il comportamento adulto,

anche se NoN ne rimane traccia nella memoria?

"Il cervello emotivo" risponde a tutte queste domande

e

che si è evoluto per permetterci di sopravvivere.

I tend to agree with theorists who say there are basic emotions that are hard-wired into the brain's architecture, and that one of the advantages of having an extra big cortex is that we can blend different hard-wired emotions together to create softer emotions, where cognitions come into play in a major way. For example, while detection and responding to danger may be built into the brain, the capacity to be afraid of falling in love is something that requires the cognitive integration of the system for finding mates and the system for defending against predators.

LeDoux’s book focuses on eight major themes about the nature of emotions that are worth reviewing here because they carry the most significant message of his book.

1. The proper level of analysis of a psychological function is "the level at which that function is represented in the brain." In other words "emotion" is a label we give to a physical brain process.

2. The brain systems associated with the generation of emotions are similar in all higher animals.

3. Function of emotional systems in an animal with the capacity for conscious awareness gives rise to conscious emotions--or feelings.

4. The conscious "feelings" we have about emotions are only interpretations of real processes and are not reliable indictors in scientific study. Human interpretations of the causes and meaning of emotions are often totally incorrect. (This theme is identified by LeDoux as "hard to swallow" for many people.)

5. With the emotional feelings and responses as indicators, objectively measurable indicators can be used to study the underlying physical brain mechanisms.

7. Emotions are not conscious. They "happen to us." We can’t "will them" to occur. Conversely, emotions can "flood" consciousness. The human brain is wired so that the connections of emotional systems to the cognitive brain circuits are stronger and more numerous than those from the cognitive systems to the emotional systems.

8.Once they occur, emotions become powerful motivators. Mental problems and disorders reflect a breakdown of emotional order. Mental health is primarily achieved through attention to emotional hygiene, not just cognitive processes.

To understand what is happening in the brain in the moment you decide, at will, to summon to consciousness a passage of Mozart's music, or decide to take a deep breath, is like trying to "catch a phantom by the tail". Consciousness remains that most elusive of all human phenomena - one so mysterious, one that even our highly developed knowledge of brain function can only partly explain. This book is unique in tracing the origins of consciousness. It takes the investigation back many years in an attempt to uncover just how consciousness might have first emerged. Consciousness did not develop suddenly in humans - it evolved gradually. In 'The Primordial Emotions', Derek Denton, a world renowned expert on animal instinct and a leader in integrative physiology, investigates the evolution of consciousness. Central to the book is the idea that the primal emotions - elements of instinctive behaviour - were the first dawning of consciousness. Throughout he examines instinctive behaviours, such as hunger for air, hunger for minerals, thirst, and pain, arguing that the emotions elicited from these behaviours and desire for gratification culminated in the first conscious states. To develop the theory he looks at behaviour at different levels of the evolutionary tree, for example of octopuses, fish, snakes, birds, and elephants. Coupled with findings from neuroimaging studies, and the viewpoints on consciousness from some of the key figures in philosophy and neuroscience, the book presents an accessible and groundbreaking new look at the problem of consciousness.

Brains are expensive to run, so why do human beings invest 20% of their energy in running what is 'the most complex collection of matter in the universe'? Could it be that something so 'primitive' as thirst was the impetus? Professor Derek Denton, founding director of the famed Florey Institute in Melbourne has written a new book on this idea. The implications are profound.

Lane R.D., Ahern G.L., Schwartz G.E., Kaszniak A.W., (1997a), “Alexithemia: A new neurological model based on a hypothesized deficit in the conscious experience of emotion”, in A Vingerhoets, F. van bussel. And J. Boelhouwer (Eds.), The (Non)Ewpression of Emotion in Health and Disease, Tilburg University Press, Tilburg, The Netherlands.

Schore A., (1996), “The experience-dependent maturation of a regulatory system in the orbital prefrontal cortex and the origin of developmental psychopathology”, in Development and Psychopathology, 8, pp. 59-87.

Esiste la Perfume Culture ?

The smell of diffidence

Estratti da "Il Profumo: Cultura, storia e tecniche"

According to Franco Cardini, professor of Medieval History at the University of Florence, Western culture of smellis characterized by an interestinghistorical ambiguity. On the one hand it is rooted in the traditions of Ancient Greece and Rome, where aromas and essences were associated with feminine frailty and the dangerous world of magic. Although the hedonistic use of fragrant oils and balms was widespread among Greeks and Romans alike, they generally regarded it as unworthy of serious consideration. The development of perfume remained largely confined to its Arab and Persian origins, cultures of which they were highly diffident. A contrasting tendency emerged in the Hellenic (and later Christian) tradition, which opened the path to Oriental cultures – initially through the expansion of Alexander the Great’s empire, later through the dispersion of the Christian Bible. Trading relationships and cultural exchanges with Middle Eastern cultures progressively intensified, and new spice routes became the object of crusades and wars in the Middle Ages.

Despite these cross-cultural influences, the sense of smell continues to evoque suspicion in our contemporary Western habits and behaviour.

There seems to be a platonic hierarchy in our culture that places our senses of sight and hearing in the realm of spiritual refinement – music, poetry, painting and sculpture representing all things civilised – whereas the senses of smell, taste, and touch are primarily linked to lower elements of culture, such as food and eroticism, which have been traditionally perceived as conveyers of spiritual corruption. Western perfumery as we know it today is still a product of this cultural heritage.

So, for most of us, modern daily life is

an on-going test of self-control

Our modern lives are an orgy of abandon, Akst says, a thoughtless pursuit of immediate gratification, despite our desire to do better.

Our pleasure predilection is bad, yes, but it isn’t so much that, say, our cupcake craving threatens to imminently destroy our health — though the list of activities at the start of this review are responsible for nearly half of US deaths — as that weakness of will undermines “the thing that makes us most distinctly human, which is our ability to disobey our impulses in favor of some larger purpose.’’

A clever blend of scientifically informed polemic and morally minded jeremiad, “We Have Met the Enemy’s’’ guiding assumption is that in our age of affluence the “ideology of temptation’’ has changed. A constellation of powerful forces, from the accessibility of fast food and casual sexual encounters to the weakening of community ties and capitalism’s exhortation to consume, have outpaced common sense.

Since forgiveness comes more naturally to us than condemnation, we pathologize excess.

We’re all not guilty by reason of disease. As Akst writes, “That it’s now possible to be addicted to cocaine, shopping, or sex is evidence of how far we’ve moved beyond the constraints of budget, custom, and embarrassment.’’

We Have Met

the Enemy

:

Self-Control in

an Age of Excess

In “We Have Met the Enemy,” Daniel Akst tackles some of the biggest questions of our times, questions that we’re often afraid to ask because they require us to think about thorny issues like freedom, willpower, human nature, and how to make sense of many of our social ills: obesity, alcoholism, overspending, etc.

The term “personal responsibility” has been hijacked by conservatives over the last few decades, and Akst’s topic of self-control unavoidably wades deep into those waters. His politics appear to be an interesting combination of libertarian and liberal. Yet he eschews knee-jerk hysteria and political correctness and instead brings to the discussion a great deal of nuance, thoughtfulness and scientific evidence.

He’s grappled long and hard with how we as a society can balance freedom

with the many temptations it brings.

First, gaining self-control

is one of the hardest things

most people will ever do.

Second, you will need help to do it.

what

We Have Met the Enemy

is about.

It’s an investigation of how we manage (or fail to manage) desire,

one in which I glide freely across disciplines as only a practiced dilettante can. Nobody likes a Puritan, John Dewey reminds us, and so I was careful to avoid penning some grimly censorious screed. On the contrary, by the time I was finished I was full of sympathy for those who, from Augustine to Eliot Spitzer, find themselves on the losing end of our never-ending battle with desire. On top of which, the history, psychology, economics and politics of self-control are a lot of fun, and that’s what I had with the book.

According to journalist and novelist Akst ( The Webster Chronicle ),

modern life, particularly in the United States, resembles a giant all-you-can-eat buffet, offering more food, sex, credit, alcohol, drugs, gambling, and anything else that can be taken to excess than ever before.

This is happening at the same time that long-standing social constraints on behavior, such as religion and tradition, are eroding.

The result is a harder-than-ever struggle for self-mastery and control over one’s destiny. Akst combines the disciplines of history, philosophy, psychology, economics, and literature in examining this phenomenon and inspires readers to view self-control in a positive light. Essential book for all people concerned with their own overindulgences and with the future of society in general.

Has modern technology ruined our self-control?

The good times are killing us, Daniel Akst suggests in We Have Met The Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, but at least he believes there are steps we can take to keep ourselves from having too much fun. Compared to other critics of American affluence, this qualifies him as an optimist. His general take: Cheap food, easy credit, overwhelming consumer choice, lax social mores, and all the other virtues that bedevil us here in the land of the alarmingly unrestrained may stack the deck against us, but if, like Odysseus, we’re willing to bind ourselves to the mast whenever our own personal Sirens start trilling their irresistible melodies, we may yet escape complete ruin.

In Akst’s estimation, saying “no” to modern life’s immersive temptations is our culture’s “biggest and most enduring challenge,” and he’s got some compelling statistics to bolster this contention. According to a Harvard study he cites, extending medical coverage to all Americans would save approximately 45,000 lives a year. Meanwhile, nearly half of the 2.5 million Americans who expire each year could postpone their demises if they could only summon the strength to forsake punitively taxed cigarettes and Jersey Shore marathons.

Hear that, tubby patriots? Universal jumping jacks could save far more lives than universal healthcare, a prospect that should gladden the sclerotic hearts of both Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore, and yet we mostly fail to take action. Or at least score few victories in our battles with temptation.

“Why is self-control so difficult?” Akst asks.

“We might as well start by looking at our own devices, which have made everything cheaper, faster, and easier. Someday somebody will invent devices that can help us exercise more self control,” but until that day, he concludes, “technology is the problem.”

Akst dismisses TV as a “cheap, immediate pleasure” that turns us away from “longer term satisfactions requiring patience and diligence.” He calls the Internet a “diabolical means of distraction.” Everywhere he turns, in fact, he sees “weapons of mass consumption” designed to undermine our good intentions by playing to our more impulsive urges.

When Akst covers how our brains work and the many experiments social scientists have devised to show us how easy we are to manipulate, the bad news continues. Have you heard, for example, about the Yale psychologist who was able to influence how subjects assessed an individual’s personality simply by giving them hot or cold drinks to hold for a while? (Those given hot drinks judged the individual warmer.) Or inspired subjects to interrupt more frequently by exposing them to words associated with rudeness? “We have much less volition and autonomy than we think,” the psychologist tells Akst.

Still, Akst stands firm in his conviction that we do, as individuals, have agency over our choices and must take responsibility for them. The trick is to know we’re sailing through dangerous waters and to constrain our will against foreseeable desires we’d like to withstand. Psychologists call this practice pre-commitment. Akst describes one woman who freezes her credit card in a block of ice as a way to discourage spending. Another pours salt on half her dessert as a means of portion control.

To regulate their Internet usage, problem Web surfers use Covenant Eyes, which keeps track of the sites you visit and mails them to an “accountability partner” you designate. Freedom is a productivity app procrastinators use to keep themselves off the Internet long enough to get some work done. At stickK.com, you can pledge to give $1000 to a charity you support—or oppose—if you light up a cigarette. “Anti-charities are apparently highly motivating,” Akst reports. “stickK says they have an 85 percent success rate.”

And thus technology marches forward. Indeed, when Akst exclaimed that technology has made everything cheaper, faster, and easier, he was right—it’s just that everything includes organic bananas as well as Big Macs, portion control plates along with bottomless pasta bowls at Olive Garden. And even the invidious forces of TV and the Internet have incredible upsides. Shows like Trading Spaces and Biggest Loser have transformed the boob tube from electronic pacifier to America’s life coach, inspiring millions to remodel their kitchens and renovate their asses. The Internet may distract us, but it can also inspire preternatural focus in those who use it. Before the Web came along, how many tweens were writing 10,000-word fanfics about their favorite characters from the 2,500-page serials they spent their days and nights chain-reading? How many adults devoted their leisure to crafting encyclopedia entries on Spanish heraldry or leaf-cutter ants? Even in the Internet age, patience and diligence persist.

If it’s easy to overindulge these days, it’s also easy to make good choices. And it’s getting easier all the time. Thus, it comes as something of surprise when, after making a case for self-control, Akst is so quick to suggest that the government might manage, somewhat oxymoronically, our self-control for us. “If self-mastery is such a problem, should we demand that government do more to protect us from ourselves?” he asks. “And is it really capable of doing so? The answers are yes and maybe.”

In their 2008 book Nudge, University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and White House advisor Cass Sunstein promoted what they call libertarian paternalism—the idea that the government or other “choice architects” can make it easier for people to make decisions that benefit themselves and society in general by the way they arrange potential choices or options, without actually compelling anyone to engage in specific actions. An employer might make its 401(k) plan opt-out rather than opt-in to encourage more employees to participate in it. A health insurance plan might offer some kind of reward points to members who exercise on a regular basis.

Akst echoes such sentiments. “[The government] needs to step in where informational asymmetries or dangerous appetites make people easy marks for amoral profit seekers,” he writes. “It needs to shape the public realm in ways that promote healthy choices. And most of all, it needs to provide strong weapons of pre-commitment to those who would use them.”

One idea Akst proposes is allowing people to affix “No Tobacco” or “No Alcohol” stickers on their IDs, banning themselves from purchasing these products. Another is giving a tax break to couples who reach “some marital milestone.” In these instances, the pre-commitments affect people on an individual basis, but it’s easy to see how pre-commitment for one might easily shift to pre-commitment for all once the government got involved. Who, for example, gets to decide which appetites are dangerous enough to warrant government intervention? How can the public realm be shaped without imposing features that some individuals will consider coercive rather than elective?

Then of course there’s the fact that the government tends to suffer self-control problems of its own.

The best way we can help it from compulsively fine-tuning our lives is to refrain from granting it such powers in the first place.

" il vero ottimista è colui che guarda la vita senza occhiali rosa,

magari con un po’ di pessimismo“.

Penso negativo perché son viva

e

ridimensiono le mie aspettative.

Il mio segreto è ridimensionare le aspettative

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich points out the rather sinister lining behind the 'positive' facade,

showing how brain washing under the Shah and in Korea meant that if you questioned the status quo, the poverty and brutality that existed you were spreading defeatism which was a punishable crime.

She points out how financial realists such as Gelbrand, who ran the property section of Lehmans were already pointing out that they seriously needed to rethink their 'positive Pollyana' attitude, as early as 2006.

The CEO, fired him for being negative!

She points out that anxiety and realism are tools

that help us to survive

rather than hinder us.

That unchecked optimism that is NOT based on fact

is an undesirable

and often DANGEROUS attitude.

After all who would go to sea in a storm without safety rafts,flares etc

Smile or Die:

How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Jenni Murray

Jenni Murray salutes a long-overdue demolition of the suggestion that positive thinking

is the answer to all our problems

Every so often a book appears that so chimes with your own thinking, yet flies so spectacularly in the face of fashionable philosophy, that it comes as a profoundly reassuring relief.

After reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, I feel as if I can wallow in grief, gloom, disappointment or whatever negative emotion comes naturally without worrying that I've become that frightful stereotype, the curmudgeonly, grumpy old woman. Instead, I can be merely human: someone who doesn't have to convince herself that every rejection or disaster is a golden opportunity to "move on" in an upbeat manner..

Ehrenreich came to her critique of the multi-billion-dollar positive-thinking industry – a swamp of books, DVDs, life coaches, executive coaches and motivational speakers – in similar misery-making circumstances to those I experienced. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and, like me, found herself increasingly disturbed by the martial parlance and "pink" culture that has come to surround the disease. My response when confronted with the "positive attitude will help you battle and survive this experience" brigade was to rail against the use of militaristic vocabulary and ask how miserable the optimism of the "survivor" would make the poor woman who was dying from her breast cancer. It seemed to me that an "invasion" of cancer cells was a pure lottery. No one knows the cause. As Ehrenreich says: "I had no known risk factors, there was no breast cancer in the family, I'd had my babies relatively young and nursed them both. I ate right, drank sparingly, worked out, and, besides, my breasts were so small that I figured a lump or two would improve my figure." (Mercifully, she hasn't lost her sense of humour.)

I had long suspected that improved survival rates for women who had breast cancer had absolutely nothing to do with the "power" of positive thinking. For women diagnosed between 2001 and 2006, 82% were expected to survive for five years, compared with only 52% diagnosed 30 years earlier. The figures can be directly related to improved detection, better surgical techniques, a greater understanding of the different types of breast cancer and the development of targeted treatments. Ehrenreich presents the evidence of numerous studies demonstrating that positive thinking has no effect on survival rates and she provides the sad testimonies of women who have been devastated by what one researcher has called "an additional burden to an already devastated patient".

Pity, for example, the woman who wrote to the mind/body medical guru Deepak Chopra: "Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back. Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps re-occurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude."

As Ehrenreich goes on to explain, exhortations to think positively – to see the glass as half-full even when it lies shattered on the floor – are not restricted to the pink-ribbon culture of breast cancer. She roots America's susceptibility to the philosophy of positive thinking in the country's Calvinist past and demonstrates how, in its early days, a puritanical "demand for perpetual effort and self-examination to the point of self-loathing" terrified small children and reduced "formerly healthy adults to a condition of morbid withdrawal, usually marked by physical maladies as well as inner terror".

It was only in the early 19th century that the clouds of Calvinist gloom began to break and a new movement began to grow that would take as fervent a hold as the old one had. It was the joining of two thinkers, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, in the 1860s that brought about the formalisation of a post-Calvinist world-view, known as the New Thought Movement. A new type of God was envisaged who was no longer hostile and indifferent, but an all-powerful spirit whom humans had merely to access to take control of the physical world.

Middle-class women found this new style of thinking, which came to be known as the "laws of attraction", particularly beneficial. They had spent their days shut out from any role other than reclining on a chaise longue, denied any opportunity to strive in the world, but the New Thought approach and its "talking therapy" developed by Quimby opened up exciting new possibilities. Mary Baker Eddy, a beneficiary of the cure, went on to found Christian Science. Ehrenreich notes that although this new style of positive thinking did apparently help invalidism or neurasthenia, it had no effect whatsoever on diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis and cholera – just as, today, it will not cure cancer.

Thus it was that positive thinking, the assumption that one only has to think a thing or desire it to make it happen, began its rapid rise to influence. Today, as Ehrenreich shows, it has a massive impact on business, religion and the world's economy. She describes visits to motivational speaker conferences where workers who have recently been made redundant and forced to join the short-term contract culture are taught that a "good team player" is by definition "a positive person" who "smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical and gratefully submits to whatever the boss demands". These are people who have less and less power to chart their own futures, but who are given, thanks to positive thinking, "a world-view – a belief system, almost a religion – that claimed they were, in fact, infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds."

And none was more susceptible to the lure of this philosophy than those self-styled "masters of the universe", the Wall Street bankers. Those of us raised to believe that saving up, having a deposit and living within one's means were the way to proceed and who wondered how on earth the credit crunch and the subprime disasters could have happened need look no further than the culture that argued that positive thinking would enable anyone to realise their desires. (Or as one of Ehrenreich's chapter headings has it, "God wants you to be rich".)

Ehrenreich's work explains where the cult of individualism began and what a devastating impact it has had on the need for collective responsibility.

We must, she says, shake off our capacity for self-absorption and take action against the threats that face us, whether climate change, conflict, feeding the hungry, funding scientific inquiry or education that fosters critical thinking.

She is anxious to emphasise that she does "not write in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness… and the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking". Her book, it seems to me, is a call for the return of common sense and, I'm afraid, in what purports to be a work of criticism, I can find only positive things to say about it. Damn!

But it has to be asked and has to be answered.

As Drucker explained,

"Knowledge workers are neither bosses nor workers,

but rather something in between--resources who have responsibility

for developing their most important resource, brainpower,

and who also need to take more control of their own careers."

What exactly does it mean to be aneducated person? The definition of an educated person has changed dramatically over the period of the last century, and this is what Peter Drucker, author of, “The Age of Social Transformation” discusses in his essay.

He believes that an educated person is one “who has learned how to learn, and who continues learning, especially by formal education, throughout his or her lifetime ”

(Drucker 233)

People without this type of education are seen as failures in today’s society. A person with an abundance of knowledge through formal education is usually placed upon a pedestal. This pedestal is signified through occupation (professionals) and status (standards of living). This standard is a set rule each person in society is expected to live up to. Without schooling, an individual is looked down upon and does not receive opportunities to attain that higher position in his/her society. This is a society in which the “common good” of the society is not taken into consideration. Society has become ignorant to the fact that there are individuals in this society that do not have the opportunity to receive a formal education, but does that mean that they cannot acquire knowledge in other ways ?

The Eight New Management Assumptions

Drucker identifies the following new assumptions for the social discipline of management.

1. Management is NOT only for profit-making businesses. Management is the specific and distinguishing organ of any and all organizations.

2. There is NOT only one right organization. The right organization is the organization that fits the task.

3. There is NOT one right way to manage people. One does not "manage" people. The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.

4. Technologies and End-Users are NOT fixed and given. Increasingly, neither technology nor end-use is a foundation of management policy. They are limitations. The foundations have to be customer values and customer decisions on the distribution of their disposable income. It is with those that management policy and management strategy increasingly will have to start.

5. Management's scope is NOT only legally defined. The new assumption on which management, both as a discipline and as a practice, will increasingly have to base itself is that the scope of management is not legal. It has to be operational. It has to embrace the entire process. It has to be focused on results and performance across the entire economic chain.

6. Management's scope is NOT only politically defined. National boundaries are important primarily as restraints. The practice of management - and by no means for business only - will increasingly have to be defined operationally rather than politically.

7. The Inside is NOT the only Management domain. The results of any institution exist ONLY on the outside. Management exits for the sake of the institution's results. It has to start with the intended results and organize the resources of the institution to attain these results. It is the organ that renders the institution, whether business, church, university, hospital or a battered woman's shelter, capable of producing results outside of itself.

8. Management's concern and management's responsibility are everything that affects the performance of the institution and its results - whether inside or outside, whether under the institution's control or totally beyond it.

Managing Oneself

five demands on knowledge-workers

1. They have to ask

:

Who Am I ?

What are my strengths ?

How Do I work ?

2. They have to ask

:

Where do I belong ?

3. They have to ask

:

What is my contribution ?

4. They have to take Relationship Responsibility.

5. They have to plan for the Second Half of their Lives.

Drucker gives this advice for using feedback analysis

1. Concentrate on your strengths.

Place yourself where your strengths can produce performance and results.

2. Work on improving your strenghts.

The feedback analysis shows where to imoprove skills, and get new knowledge.

One can usually get enough skill or knowledge not to be incompetent in it.

3) The Hidden Brain

We don't feel 20 times sadder when we hear that 20 people have died in a disaster than when we hear that one person has died, even though the magnitude of the tragedy is 20 times as large.

We can reach such a conclusion abstractly, in our conscious minds, but we cannot feel it viscerally, because that is the domain of the hidden brain, and the hidden brain is simply not calibrated to deal with the difference between a single death and 20 deaths.

“The Hidden Brain” is the part of our mind that is not ordinarily accessible to our consciousness through introspection. In other words, we don’t know that it is there, and can’t detect it just by thinking about it. But it controls many things that we do, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.Vedantam concludes that it developed in human beings to promote survival under primitive conditions, and is still performing its functions today, whether they are appropriate to our current circumstances or not.

"In The Hidden Brain, one of America's best science journalists describes how our unconscious minds influence everything from criminal trials to charitable giving, from suicide bombers to presidential elections. The Hidden Brain is a smart and engaging exploration of the science behind the headlines—and of the little man behind the screen. Don't miss it."

—Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

When It’s Head Versus Heart,

The Heart Wins

Science shows that when we are deciding

which candidate to support,

anxiety, enthusiasm and whom we identify with

count more than reason or logic.

How Obama Got It Right in 2009

Morality drives policy. Too often, progressives have tried it the other way around, then looked on in dismay as conservatives led with their moral view and won one policy fight after another, even when polling showed most Americans disagreed with conservative policies!

On Thursday night, President Obama didn't make this mistake. Instead, he spoke to our better angels, confidently, forcefully and inclusively. He seized the moral authority with his grammar and demeanor: "Pass this jobs bill" is an imperative sentence; it attributes authority to the speaker. The repetition is a reminder of moral authority.

The speech was remarkable in many ways. It was plainspoken, Trumanesque. It focused on the progressive moral worldview that has from the beginning been the life force of American democracy. In virtually every sentence, it was a call for cooperative joint action for the benefit of all.

Let's look at the way Obama articulated the progressive moral worldview that recognizes both personal and social responsibility. He said:

Yes, we are rugged individualists. Yes, we are strong and self-reliant. And it has been the drive and initiative of our workers and entrepreneurs that has made this economy the engine and envy of the world.But there has always been another thread running throughout our history -- a belief that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation...

Ask yourselves -- where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways, not to build our bridges, our dams, our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the GI Bill. Where would we be if they hadn't had that chance?

No single individual built America on their own. We built it together. We have been, and always will be, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all; a nation with responsibilities to ourselves and with responsibilities to one another. Members of Congress, it is time for us to meet our responsibilities.

Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never seen and never will see.
American Democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy.

That is the progressive moral view Obama used to such great effect Thursday night. However important particular policy prescriptions may be, they do not automatically evoke this moral view. No listener moves from Obama's talk of extending the social security tax holiday to the heartfelt understanding that we are responsible for one another.

Obama showed us he understood that policy flows from morality. That is why he articulated the morality behind his recommendations at the climactic moment of his speech. From this morality, he said, all else follows.

There are other things to note in the speech. One of those was his choice to say, "You should pass this jobs plan right away." The unusual imperative formulation is "right away." Typically, a politician would structure the imperative around the words "now" or "immediately." Such language, however, wouldn't fit the morality Obama hoped to embody Wednesday night.

"Do it now," is strict parent or authoritarian language. It is, "Do what I say." There's no less urgency in "right away," but there is a sense of "join us on this righteous path." The reason is that "away" is a spatial word that traces a path from where we are in a forward direction, a path of action toward the achievement of an accepted goal. It is inclusive and welcoming, while also indicating the urgency of the request. By using "right away," Obama skillfully communicated that we all in this together.

The president also explicitly rejected the conservative moral view of personal responsibility without social responsibility: the idea that no one should have to pay for anyone else, that paying for a government that helps fellow citizens who require help is immoral.

But what we can't do -- what I won't do -- is let this economic crisis be used as an excuse to wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety. I reject the argument that says for the economy to grow, we have to roll back protections that ban hidden fees by credit card companies, or rules that keep our kids from being exposed to mercury, or laws that prevent the health insurance industry from shortchanging patients. I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy. We shouldn't be in a race to the bottom, where we try to offer the cheapest labor and the worst pollution standards. America should be in a race to the top. And I believe we can win that race.In fact, this larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone's money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own -- that's not who we are. That's not the story of America.

If you look at policies alone, policies that have been proposed by both Democrats and Republicans, you miss the main event. The very idea of working together for the good of fellow citizens in need of help is a progressive idea; it is the idea behind the view of democracy that has sustained America from its beginning.

Conservatives are not going to like cooperating on Obama's jobs plan. The very idea contradicts much of what they believe.

Meanwhile, the president put them in a bind. If they co-operate in helping their fellow citizens, they violate their code of personal responsibility without social responsibility. If they don't co-operate, they look callous and irresponsible.

Blog Entries by George Lakoff

The Santorum Strategy is not just about Santorum. It is about pounding the most radical conservative ideas into the public mind by constant repetition during the Republican presidential campaign, whether by Santorum himself, by Gingrich or Ron Paul, by an intimidated Romney, or by the Republican House majority. The Republican...

Progressives had some fun last week with Frank Luntz, who told the Republican Governors' Association that he was scared to death of the Occupy movement and recommended language to combat what the movement had achieved. But the progressive critics mostly just laughed, said his language wouldn't work, and assumed that...

What's next? That's the question being asked as cities close down Occupy encampments and winter approaches.

The answer is simple. Just as the Tea Party gained power, the Occupy Movement can. The Occupy movement has raised awareness of a great many of America's real issues and has organized supporters across...

I was asked weeks ago by some in the Occupy Wall Street movement to make suggestions for how to frame the movement. I have hesitated so far, because I think the movement should be framing itself. It's a general principle: Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you -- the...

My wife, Kathleen, and I stood gaping at the TV as we watched the towers fall. Kathleen said to me, "Do you realize what Bush and Cheney are going to do with this?" We both realized very well. Until 9/11, the Bush presidency was weak. On 9/11, Cheney understood that...

Morality drives policy. Too often, progressives have tried it the other way around, then looked on in dismay as conservatives led with their moral view and won one policy fight after another, even when polling showed most Americans disagreed with conservative policies!

Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other,...

Last week, on April 13, 2011, President Obama gave all Democrats and all progressives a remarkable gift. Most of them barely noticed. They looked at the president's speech as if it were only about budgetary details. But the speech went well beyond the budget. It went to the heart of...

The Wisconsin protests are about much more than budgets and unions. As I observed in "What Conservatives Really Want," the conservative story about budget deficits is a ruse to turn the country conservative in every area. Karl Rove and Shep Smith have made it clear...

For the first two years of his administration, President Obama had no overriding narrative, no frame to define his policymaking, no way to make sense of what he was trying to do. As of his 2011 State of the Union Address, he has one: Competitiveness.

There is no ideology of the "center." What is called a "centrist" or a "moderate" is actually very different -- a bi-conceptual, someone who is conservative on some issues and progressive on others, in many, many possible combinations. Why does this matter? From the perspective of how the brain works,...

The usual pundits, for all their verbiage, have missed a lot, especially since they have nobody from the cognitive and brain sciences discussing the election. Here's part of what's been missing from the discussion.

First, conservatives have an extensive, but not obvious communications system, with many think tanks, framing experts,...

Today, September 28, 2010, EcoAmerica is hosting an important environmental conference, America The Best, in Washington, DC, for a small group of specialists in environmental communication to see what ideas emerge. Because of the number of distinguished participants, I compressed my ideas to just a few pages. I...

The Democratic response to the Republican Pledge to America has been factual about its economics. The September 26, 2010 Sunday New York Times editorial goes through the economic details, and Democrats have been citing the economic facts from the Congressional Budget Office. As Dan Pfeiffer reports

The issue is death -- death gushing at ten thousand pounds per square inch from a mile below the sea, tens of thousands of barrels of death a day. Not just death to eleven human beings. Death to sea birds, sea turtles, dolphins, fish, oyster beds, shrimp, beaches; death to...

Monday, 22 February 2016

Why We Need to Aim Higher

We humans need to make an evolutionary leap. We're in much deeper trouble than we allow ourselves to recognize.

Thirty years ago, an ecologist named Garrett Hardin wrote an article in the journal Science titled, "The Tragedy of the Commons." His thesis was that individuals, acting in their rational self-interest, may ultimately destroy a precious and limited resource over time.

To illustrate, Hardin used the metaphor of an open pasture — "the commons" — to which herdsmen bring their cattle to feed. The herdsmen, living at subsistence levels, understandably want to feed as many cattle as possible to maximize their income and improve their lives. As demand rises, however, the effects of overgrazing take a progressive toll on the commons, until ultimately they're destroyed for everyone.

"Therein is the tragedy," Hardin wrote. "Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons."

How different are the rest of us in our blithe assumption that we can draw down the resources of the commons — think oil, electricity, water, for starters — regardless of the consequences in the long term?

The same is true of our own internal resources — our energy. Organizations continue to demand ever more without recognizing that sustainable performance requires that we intermittently renew our energy. We're all too willing to keep pushing ourselves, chasing the hope that more, bigger, faster will eventually prove to be better.

The tragedy is that the more we myopically focus on our immediate gratification, the more we hasten our collective demise. Spending without replenishing eventually leads to bankruptcy — in the world, and for ourselves.

How can rational human beings allow this to happen?

The answer lies in the ways our brains work. Much as we may believe we make rational choices by using our prefrontal cortex, the fact is we're often run by the more primitive parts of our brain. And they're concerned solely with our immediate survival.

Two powerful default instincts still guide much of our behavior: the fight or flight instinct to avoid pain, and the pleasure-driven hunger for immediate gratification. These instincts helped alert us to predators thousands of years ago and kept our focus on finding food and passing on our genes. They serve us far less well in today's vastly more complex world.

The modern version of these primitive instincts is the individualistic drive to accumulate more and more. We crave money, possessions, and power, hoping they'll make us feel happier and more secure.

It's a Darwinian dance, which produces a few short-term winners and a lot of losers. Our baser instincts not only override our reflective capacities, but also co-opt them. We use our brains to rationalize and minimize our choices, rather than to question them.

The truth is, we're all in this together and our choices all affect the commons. To the extent that we're not part of the solution, we're unavoidably and increasingly part of the problem.

So how can we aim higher? The evolutionary leap I have in mind — for all of us — is to move from our current focus on "me" and "mine" to a wider and shared commitment to "we" and "ours."

The ultimate scorecard isn't how much value we build for ourselves, but rather how successfully we marshal the advantages we've been given and the skills we've developed to add more value to the world than we have spent down.

Waking up begins with more consciousness and humility. It's about pushing past our infinite capacity for self-deception. It's about catching ourselves when we begin to automatically default to whatever makes us feel better in the moment. It's about widening our lens from narrowly self-serving to truly considering what choice we could make to better serve the commons. It's about having the courage to pause before we act to ask, "How would I behave here at my best?"

The irony is that the willingness to make personal sacrifice and endure some discomfort in the short term, in order to better serve the commons in the long term, is ultimately a form of enlightened self-interest. It's a vote for sustainable survival — especially for our children and grandchildren.

So how, practically, can we resolve to evolve? It's tough to do all it alone, given the power of our more primitive impulses, the force of our habits, and the endless temptations we face. We need others to make these commitments with us — to cheer us on, and hold us accountable. We need communities of practice.

Here are a few first thoughts for getting started:

Widen your lens. When you're about to undertake an activity, pause first and ask yourself this simple question: "Why am I doing this, and who will it serve? Then follow the Hippocratic oath, "Above all else, do no harm."

Consume less. If you drive, could you leave your car at home one or more days a week and carpool, or take public transportation, or bike to work? Alternatively, could you turn down your home thermostat two or three degrees from its current level throughout the coming winter?

Add more value to the commons. What's one small thing you could do every day to add value in someone's life, or to the community and world you live in? At the very least, make it a point to express your genuine appreciation for someone in your life every day. Just that will go a long way.

.

Occupy Wall Street

is going nowhere

without leadership

By Marty Linsky, Special to CNN

October 28, 2011 -- Updated 1113 GMT (1913 HKT)

Editor’s note:

Marty Linsky is co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates and has taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School for over 25 years. He served as chief secretary and counselor to Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld and has authored or co-authored 10 books, including “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.” (Harvard Business Press 2009).

(CNN) -- I would not take anything away from the success of Occupy Wall Street - OWS - in bringing so many people together in Lower Manhattan and elsewhere. It is quite an accomplishment.

Notwithstanding what has happened so far, the hard work of leadership has not yet begun.

It is relatively easy to get disempowered, angry, frustrated people together to rail against a wide range of enemies and scapegoats. It is quite another to effect change

Like it or not, the values and processes that have created the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon are inadequate and ill-suited to taking the next steps and creating real impact.

The democratic, inclusive, and consensus-driven norms that have guided OWS up to this point will not get it to the next level—that is, if there is real interest in changing the current reality rather than just complaining about it and speaking out against it.

Here are three big examples of the self-imposed constraints that will get in the way.

First, everyone’s grievance is equal to everyone else’s grievance. Anti-capitalism, lack of health care for the uninsured, tuition hikes at public universities, and many other complaints share the stage. The message is muddied. Clarifying the message and focusing on specific targets are necessary next steps. They will inevitably leave some of the grievances on the cutting room floor, and leave those who care most about those abandoned grievances disappointed and alienated both from the rest of the group and from their own constituents who are not camping out at Zuccotti Park, but who expected them to ensure that their particular issues stayed front and center.

Second, the nonhierarchical consensus-driven process will soon reach the end of its utility, at least in its purest form.

If OWS is to lead change rather than just call for change, some individuals will have to step up

and take on authority roles.

The presence of authority is essential in order to move this work forward. Someone, or some ones, will have to provide some of the functions of authority—direction, protection and order—so that the movement can begin to make hard choices, create priorities, allocate human and financial resources, and keep the anarchistic outliers from undermining the potential outcomes

When people have different agendas, the downside of operating by consensus is that the only way to get everybody to agree is to agree on something that is so ethereal and abstract it becomes meaningless. That works in an election where you are mobilizing people to vote (see Obama 2008 and “Change We Can Believe in”), but not to generate change from the outside in.

Third, the movement will have to decide whether it is willing to create change by infiltrating the dreaded system it is trying to change. There is no other way except violent revolution, and if those in Zuccotti Park think there has been pushback so far, wait till they see what is in store for them if there were to be violence.

History has important lessons here.

The great movements of the 1960s in civil rights, women’s rights, and opposition to the Vietnam War were narrowly focused, well organized, strategically brilliant, and, while attracting large numbers of people, managed by people who took on authority roles and made essential decisions, albeit often with significant consultative processes.

They all used their share of extreme measures, but all were directed toward capturing the attention and support of people on the sidelines. Violence, when it surfaced at all, was perpetrated by the system, with the protesters having adroitly stimulated the establishment powers to overreact, thus generating more popular support for their cause.

The over-the-top response by law enforcement to nonviolent civil rights protests was so embarrassing to Northern liberals like me that we had to get involved and provide the civil rights cause the additional personpower, financial resources and political clout to create change.

More recently—and both sides hate this comparison—in a remarkably short period of time, the tea party movement went from a rowdy group of people who felt disenfranchised in different ways to a nonviolent army with a sharply focused, clearly articulated agenda, and fierce commitment to infiltrate the system in order to change it. It has been amazingly successful, influencing elections and the political discourse and soon winning elections with candidates who were completely beholden to its agenda, whether they believed in it all or not.

Whether you like it or not, the tea party has changed the system.

Where does that leave OWS?

Very soon, it will come to a fork in the road. Numbers are very important in a democratic society, and OWS is beginning to have numbers that have caused some establishment members they are railing against to take notice, either positively or negatively. Right now, the Zuccotti Park protesters are being used by those establishment folks, one way or the other, to shore up their own bases and spruce up their own images. Those numbers will only translate into power, and then change, if they can be harnessed to raise the heat on the decision-makers to get them to do something they would otherwise not do. That translates, alas, into joining the system they are protesting against, by taking a page out of the tea party’s book and working in campaigns, raising money, and running for office.

Leadership is a risky and subversive activity.

The crowds at Zuccotti Park and their colleagues in other cities have yet to demonstrate that they are interested in anything other than, well, demonstrating.

Reality and Narration

It sometimes happens that when you're hard at work making fiction, you get invaded by the feeling that what's important is happening elsewhere -- something much more powerful than the story that you have been creating, with care and obsession. Human beings today need their daily dose of fiction, it's true; without it, we would not know how to live. But it is also true that, on many occasions, the rumblings of reality that come across our TVs and computer screens are so powerful that they knock the air out of you and leave you with the feeling that a film is something insignificant in comparison.

That's what happened to me on Tuesday, while I was working, an impressive tsunami of citizens at Neptuno Square howled for their right to dissent with the politicians who claim to represent them, as they were in session in Congress. The cries of this human tide, encircled and at times beaten and dragged by the 1,300 strong riot police at Neptuno Square, covered the front pages of newspapers around the world. Yet they have not managed to catch the attention of [Prime Minister] Mariano Rajoy in New York. During his address to the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, Rajoy turned to his habit of editing reality according to his whim, thanking the "silent majority of Spaniards who didn't protest."

Mr. Rajoy, I am part of that silent majority who didn't protest on September 25th, and I'm imploring you not to distort or appropriate my silence.

The fact that I was not physically present at Neptuno Square does not mean that I'm not outraged by the police attacks, the government delegate overreaction, the state-run TV network's manipulation of images, or about the cocky attitude of state agents in the Atocha Station (far removed from Congress) who, without identifying themselves, intimidated travelers and prohibited photographers from doing their work. I'm outraged, too, about the determination that we Madrilenians, upon finding our city besieged since morning, would turn against the protesters. (Mission failed: we Madrilenians suffer in silence or screaming, do not believe in the people who govern us from City Hall or in our Autonomous Community, people elected by fate because they were included in a closed electoral list).

Images, and everything that surrounds them, can be manipulated: colors, words, gestures, intentions -- it all depends on the narrator. Any given reality may mean one thing, or its opposite, according to the interests of the one who narrates it. The government's spokespeople, the president himself, can narrate what happened at Neptuno Square as they please -- they do it every day. But, fortunately, in modern times, it is impossible to be the sole narrator, no matter how many punches cops dole out to anyone toting a camera.

We live in a world dominated by new technologies (and, on this occasion, God bless them). In addition to multiple professional cameramen (impressive to see them work in the midst of this earthquake, just like war reporters. The testimony they provided us, product of moral and artistic bravery, is admirable), most protestors brought along not just all-too-true shouts and slogans ("They're robbers, they beat us -- they do not represent us!") but also cameras or cell phones. Those images will never see the light of day on state television, but they will appear on other digital news sites, or on YouTube.

On these images we can see with utter clarity the truncheon of a masked policeman (all the police were masked, except for infiltrators -- whom it was proven were indeed present), and the uncovered face of his victim: pale, with a gash in his head, a wound so real that abundant blood is flowing from it, rolling down the victim's cheeks, and dripping onto his shirt. Red blood, documented, narrated by one of the people who attended this "show."

A man injured by the police. Photo: Getty
I provided only one picture as example, but in non-state media outlets there are many, many more acting as narrators contradicting official versions of the story, and for once, receiving heavy coverage in international media. Barbarities like the ones that went down this week may keep happening. But our raw reality ("raw" in the photographic sense -- that is, the first image of reality, the one that hasn't been photoshopped) -- so complicated but at the same time so simple -- will have multiple narrators and many points of view. For those in charge of public order, it's going to be extremely difficult to silence them.

Rubber bullets and dragging protestors on the road won't do the trick.

(CNN) -- The more familiar something looks, the less threatening it seems. This is why images of funny-looking college students marching up Broadway or shirtless boys banging on drums comprise the bulk of the imagery we see of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Stockbrokers look on, police man the barricades and what appears to be a traditional protest movement carries on another day, week or month.

But Occupy is anything but a protest movement.

That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the "demands" of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world.

Just like pretty much everyone else on the planet, occupiers may want many things to happen and other things to stop, but the occupation is not about making demands. They don't want anything from you, and there is nothing you can do to make them stop. That's what makes Occupy so very scary and so very promising. It is not a protest, but a prototype for a new way of living.

Now don't get me wrong. The occupiers are not proposing a world in which we all live outside on pavement and sleep under tarps. Most of us do not have the courage, stamina or fortitude to work as hard as these people are working, anyway. (Yes, they work hard.) The urban survival camps they are setting up around the world are a bit more like showpieces, congresses and "beta" tests of ideas and behaviors the rest of us may soon be implementing in our communities, and in our own ways.

The occupiers are actually forging a robust micro-society of working groups, each one developing new approaches -- or reviving old approaches -- to long-running problems. In just one example, Occupy's General Assembly is a new, highly flexible approach to group discussion and consensus building. Unlike parliamentary rules that promote debate, difference and decision, the General Assembly forges consensus by "stacking" ideas and objections much in the fashion that computer programmers "stack" features. The whole thing is orchestrated through simple hand gestures (think commodities exchange). Elements in the stack are prioritized, and everyone gets a chance to speak. Even after votes, exceptions and objections are incorporated as amendments.

This is just one reason why occupiers seem incompatible with current ideas about policy demands or right vs. left.They are notinterested in debate (or what Enlightenment philosophers called "dialectic") but consensus. They are working to upgrade that binary, winner-takes-all, 13th century political operating system. And like any software developer, they are learning to "release early and release often."

Likewise, occupiers have embraced the Internet access solutions of the Free Network Foundation, who have erected "Freedom Towers" at the Occupy sites in New York, Austin and elsewhere through which people can access free, uncensored, authenticated Wi-Fi. As this technology scales to our own communities, what happens to corporate Internet service providers is anyone's guess.

The occupiers have formed working groups to take on myriad social and economic issues, and their many occupation sites serve to test the approaches they come up with. One group is developing a complementary currency for use, initially, within the network of Occupy communities. Its efficacy will be tested and strengthened by occupiers providing one another with goods and services before it is rolled out to the world at large. Another working group is pushing to have people withdraw their money from large corporate banks on November 5 and move it instead to local banks or cooperatively owned credit unions.

Whether or not we agree that anything at all in modern society needs to be changed, we must at least come to understand that the occupiers are not just another political movement, nor are they simply lazy kids looking for an excuse not to work. Rather, they see the futility of attempting to use the tools of a competitive, winner-takes-all society for purposes that might better be served through the tools of mutual aid. This is not a game that someone wins, but rather a form of play that is successful the more people get to play, and the longer the game is kept going.

They will succeed to the extent that the various models they are prototyping out on the pavement trickle up to those of us working on solutions from the comfort of our heated homes and offices. For as we come to embrace or even consider options such as local production and commerce, credit unions, unfettered access to communications technology and consensus-based democracy, we become occupiers ourselves.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Douglas Rushkoff.

What Women Know

about Leadership

that Men Don't

What Women Know about Leadership that Men Don't

No single challenge has been greater for me as a leader than learning how to take better care of the people I lead, and to create a safe, supportive space in which they can thrive. Like most men I know, I grew up with very little modeling around empathy — the ability to recognize, experience and be sensitive to what others are feeling.

Empathy proved especially difficult for me whenever I felt vulnerable. My instinctive response was to protect myself, most often with aggression. I equated aggression with safety, and vulnerability with weakness. Today, I recognize the opposite is often true. The more I acknowledge my own fears and uncertainties, the safer people feel with me and the more effectively they work. But even now, I'm amazed at how dense I can sometimes be.

An effective modern leader requires a blend of intellectual qualities — the ability to think analytically, strategically and creatively — and emotional ones, including self-awareness, empathy, and humility. In short, great leadership begins with being a whole human being.

I meet far more women with this blend of qualities than I do men, and especially so when it comes to emotional and social intelligence.

To a significant degree, that's a reflection of limitations men almost inevitably develop in a culture that measures us by the ability to project strength and confidence, hide what we're feeling (including from ourselves), and define who we are above all by our external accomplishments and our capacity to prevail over others.

The vast majority of CEOs and senior executives I've met over the past decade are men with just these limitations. Most of them resist introspection, feel more comfortable measuring outcomes than they do managing emotions, and under-appreciate the powerful connection between how people feel and how they perform.

I'm not suggesting gender ensures or precludes any specific qualities. I've met and hired men who are just as self-aware, authentic and capable of connection as any women. This is especially (and encouragingly) true among younger men. I've also encountered many senior women executives who've modeled themselves after male leaders, or perhaps felt they had to adopt their style to survive, and are just as narrow and emotionally limited as their worst male counterparts.

For the most part, however, women, more than men, bring to leadership a more complete range of the qualities modern leaders need, including self-awareness, emotional attunement, humility and authenticity.

That's scarcely just my own view. In March, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman reported here on their study of 7300 leaders who got rated by their peers, supervisors and direct reports. Women scored higher in 12 of 16 key skills — not just developing others, building relationships, collaborating, and practicing self development, but also taking initiative, driving for results and solving problems and analyzing issues.

In another study of 2250 adults conducted by the PEW center, women were rated higher on a range of leadership qualities including honesty, intelligence, diligence, compassion and creativity.

For all that, women still hold only 14 percent of senior executive positions in Fortune 500 companies, a percentage has barely budged over the last decade. So why do women remain so vastly underrepresented at the highest levels of large companies?

There are many answers, including the fact that even the most educated women typically take the primary role in raising their children, and are far more likely than men to scale back their careers and ambitions, or even leave the workforce altogether.

But perhaps the key explanation is that men commonly bring more of one key capacity to the competition for senior leadership roles: aggression. The word aggression comes from The Latin root "ag" (before) and "gred" (to walk or step). Aggression, therefore, connotes stepping before or in front of someone and it has an undeniably genetic component. Men have in 7 to 8 times the concentration of testosterone in their blood plasma than women do.

From an early age, men often overvalue their strengths, while women too frequently underrate theirs. In reality, we all struggle to feel a stable sense of value and self-worth. Men often defend against their doubts by moving to grandiosity and inflation, while women more frequently move to insecurity and deferral. Men seek more often to win, women to connect. So long as the path to power is connected to proving you're bigger and badder, it's no surprise that men have mostly prevailed.

But the leadership skills required to fuel great performance are far more nuanced and multi-dimensional today than ever before. As Hanna Rosin puts it in her new book The End of Men, "The post-industrial economy is indifferent to men's size and strength."

Instead, we need more male leaders with the courage to stand down, comfortably acknowledge their shortcomings, and help those they lead feel safe and appreciated rather than fearful and inadequate. We need more women with the courage to step up, fully own their strengths, and lead with confidence and resolve while also holding on to their humanity and their humility.

We need a new generation of leaders — men and women — who willingly embrace their opposites.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The author is professor of biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. This article is based on a presidential address presented before the meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Utah State University, Logan, 25 June 1968.

The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.

At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York (1) concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are ...confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation."

I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.

In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner and York exhibited this courage; publishing in a science journal, they insisted that the solution to the problem was not to be found in the natural sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement with the phrase, "It is our considered professional judgment... ." Whether they were right or not is not the concern of the present article. Rather, the concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called "no technical solution problems," and, more specifically, with the identification and discussion of one of these.

It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe. Consider the problem, "How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?" It is well known that I cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no "technical solution" to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word "win." I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can drug him; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I "win" involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the game--refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.)

The class of "No technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem--technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.

What Shall We Maximize?

Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow "geometrically," or, as we would now say, exponentially. In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease. Is ours a finite world?

A fair defense can be put forward for the view that the world is infinite; or that we do not know that it is not. But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next few generations with the foreseeable technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite. "Space" is no escape (2).

A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" be realized?

No--for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two (or more) variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by von Neumann and Morgenstern (3), but the principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential equations, dating back at least to D'Alembert (1717-1783).

The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism must have a source of energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For man, maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day ("maintenance calories"). Anything that he does over and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported by "work calories" which he takes in. Work calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech; they are also required for all forms of enjoyment, from swimming and automobile racing to playing music and writing poetry. If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do: We must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations, no sports, no music, no literature, no art. ... I think that everyone will grant, without argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods. Bentham's goal is impossible.

In reaching this conclusion I have made the usual assumption that it is the acquisition of energy that is the problem. The appearance of atomic energy has led some to question this assumption. However, given an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation, as J. H. Fremlin has so wittily shown (4). The arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were, reversed; but Bentham's goal is still unobtainable.

The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum. The difficulty of defining the optimum is enormous; so far as I know, no one has seriously tackled this problem. Reaching an acceptable and stable solution will surely require more than one generation of hard analytical work--and much persuasion.

We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for thousands. To one it is estuaries to nourish ducks for hunters to shoot; to another it is factory land. Comparing one good with another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared.

Theoretically this may be true; but in real life incommensurables are commensurable. Only a criterion of judgment and a system of weighting are needed. In nature the criterion is survival. Is it better for a species to be small and hideable, or large and powerful? Natural selection commensurates the incommensurables. The compromise achieved depends on a natural weighting of the values of the variables.

Man must imitate this process. There is no doubt that in fact he already does, but unconsciously. It is when the hidden decisions are made explicit that the arguments begin. The problem for the years ahead is to work out an acceptable theory of weighting. Synergistic effects, nonlinear variation, and difficulties in discounting the future make the intellectual problem difficult, but not (in principle) insoluble.

Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero. Any people that has intuitively identified its optimum point will soon reach it, after which its growth rate becomes and remains zero.

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum. However, by any reasonable standards, the most rapidly growing populations on earth today are (in general) the most miserable. This association (which need not be invariable) casts doubt on the optimistic assumption that the positive growth rate of a population is evidence that it has yet to reach its optimum.

We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized the "invisible hand," the idea that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote . . . the public interest" (5). Adam Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction. If it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.

Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons

The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet (6) in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). We may well call it "the tragedy of the commons," using the word "tragedy" as the philosopher Whitehead used it (7): "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." He then goes on to say, "This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama."

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of Ã¢ÂˆÂ’1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Some would say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial (8). The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

A simple incident that occurred a few years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts, shows how perishable the knowledge is. During the Christmas shopping season the parking meters downtown were covered with plastic bags that bore tags reading: "Do not open until after Christmas. Free parking courtesy of the mayor and city council." In other words, facing the prospect of an increased demand for already scarce space. the city fathers reinstituted the system of the commons. (Cynically, we suspect that they gained more votes than they lost by this retrogressive act.)

In an approximate way, the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate. But it is understood mostly only in special cases which are not sufficiently generalized. Even at this late date, cattlemen leasing national land on the western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent understanding, in constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and weed-dominance. Likewise, the oceans of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas." Professing to believe in the "inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction (9).

The National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent--there is only one Yosemite Valley--whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone.

What shall we do? We have several options. We might sell them off as private property. We might keep them as public property, but allocate the right to enter them. The allocation might be on the basis of wealth, by the use of an auction system. It might be on the basis of merit, as defined by some agreed-upon standards. It might be by lottery. Or it might be on a first-come, first-served basis, administered to long queues. These, I think, are all the reasonable possibilities. They are all objectionable. But we must choose--or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that we call our National Parks.

Pollution

In a reverse way, the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in--sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air, and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.

The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution. The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream--whose property extends to the middle of the stream, often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past his door. The law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to adapt it to this newly perceived aspect of the commons.

The pollution problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. "Flowing water purifies itself every 10 miles," my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many people. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

How To Legislate Temperance?

Analysis of the pollution problem as a function of population density uncovers a not generally recognized principle of morality, namely: the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed (10). Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable. A hundred and fifty years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal. He was not in any important sense being wasteful. Today, with only a few thousand bison left, we would be appalled at such behavior.

In passing, it is worth noting that the morality of an act cannot be determined from a photograph. One does not know whether a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is harming others until one knows the total system in which his act appears. "One picture is worth a thousand words," said an ancient Chinese; but it may take 10,000 words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as it is to reformers in general to try to persuade others by way of the photographic shortcut. But the essense of an argument cannot be photographed: it must be presented rationally--in words.

That morality is system-sensitive escaped the attention of most codifiers of ethics in the past. "Thou shalt not . . ." is the form of traditional ethical directives which make no allowance for particular circumstances. The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world. Our epicyclic solution is to augment statutory law with administrative law. Since it is practically impossible to spell out all the conditions under which it is safe to burn trash in the back yard or to run an automobile without smog-control, by law we delegate the details to bureaus. The result is administrative law, which is rightly feared for an ancient reason--Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?--"Who shall watch the watchers themselves?" John Adams said that we must have "a government of laws and not men." Bureau administrators, trying to evaluate the morality of acts in the total system, are singularly liable to corruption, producing a government by men, not laws.

Prohibition is easy to legislate (though not necessarily to enforce); but how do we legislate temperance? Experience indicates that it can be accomplished best through the mediation of administrative law. We limit possibilities unnecessarily if we suppose that the sentiment of Quis custodiet denies us the use of administrative law. We should rather retain the phrase as a perpetual reminder of fearful dangers we cannot avoid. The great challenge facing us now is to invent the corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep custodians honest. We must find ways to legitimate the needed authority of both the custodians and the corrective feedbacks.

Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable

The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed solely by the principle of "dog eat dog"--if indeed there ever was such a world--how many children a family had would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately for their children. David Lack and others have found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the fecundity of birds (11). But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at least.

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own "punishment" to the germ line--then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state (12), and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement (13)? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.

Unfortunately this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United Nations. In late 1967, some 30 nations agreed to the following (14): The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.

It is painful to have to deny categorically the validity of this right; denying it, one feels as uncomfortable as a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, who denied the reality of witches in the 17th century. At the present time, in liberal quarters, something like a taboo acts to inhibit criticism of the United Nations. There is a feeling that the United Nations is "our last and best hope," that we shouldn't find fault with it; we shouldn't play into the hands of the archconservatives. However, let us not forget what Robert Louis Stevenson said: "The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy." If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even though it is promoted by the United Nations. We should also join with Kingsley Davis (15) in attempting to get Planned Parenthood-World Population to see the error of its ways in embracing the same tragic ideal.

Conscience Is Self-Eliminating

It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience. Charles Galton Darwin made this point when he spoke on the centennial of the publication of his grandfather's great book. The argument is straightforward and Darwinian.

People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The difference will be accentuated, generation by generation.

In C. G. Darwin's words: "It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus" (16).

The argument assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which) is hereditary--but hereditary only in the most general formal sense. The result will be the same whether the attitude is transmitted through germ cells, or exosomatically, to use A. J. Lotka's term. (If one denies the latter possibility as well as the former, then what's the point of education?) The argument has here been stated in the context of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good--by means of his conscience. To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.

Pathogenic Effects of Conscience

The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist "in the name of conscience," what are we saying to him? What does he hear? --not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: (i) (intended communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; (ii) (the unintended communication) "If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons."

Everyman then is caught in what Bateson has called a "double bind." Bateson and his co-workers have made a plausible case for viewing the double bind as an important causative factor in the genesis of schizophrenia (17). The double bind may not always be so damaging, but it always endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is applied. "A bad conscience," said Nietzsche, "is a kind of illness."

To conjure up a conscience in others is tempting to anyone who wishes to extend his control beyond the legal limits. Leaders at the highest level succumb to this temptation. Has any President during the past generation failed to call on labor unions to moderate voluntarily their demands for higher wages, or to steel companies to honor voluntary guidelines on prices? I can recall none. The rhetoric used on such occasions is designed to produce feelings of guilt in noncooperators.

For centuries it was assumed without proof that guilt was a valuable, perhaps even an indispensable, ingredient of the civilized life. Now, in this post-Freudian world, we doubt it.

Paul Goodman speaks from the modern point of view when he says: "No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties" (18).

One does not have to be a professional psychiatrist to see the consequences of anxiety. We in the Western world are just emerging from a dreadful two-centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros that was sustained partly by prohibition laws, but perhaps more effectively by the anxiety-generating mechanism of education. Alex Comfort has told the story well in The Anxiety Makers (19); it is not a pretty one.

Since proof is difficult, we may even concede that the results of anxiety may sometimes, from certain points of view, be desirable. The larger question we should ask is whether, as a matter of policy, we should ever encourage the use of a technique the tendency (if not the intention) of which is psychologically pathogenic. We hear much talk these days of responsible parenthood; the coupled words are incorporated into the titles of some organizations devoted to birth control. Some people have proposed massive propaganda campaigns to instill responsibility into the nation's (or the world's) breeders. But what is the meaning of the word responsibility in this context? Is it not merely a synonym for the word conscience? When we use the word responsibility in the absence of substantial sanctions are we not trying to browbeat a free man in a commons into acting against his own interest? Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit for a substantial quid pro quo. It is an attempt to get something for nothing.

If the word responsibility is to be used at all, I suggest that it be in the sense Charles Frankel uses it (20). "Responsibility," says this philosopher, "is the product of definite social arrangements." Notice that Frankel calls for social arrangements--not propaganda.

Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed upon

The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort. Consider bank-robbing. The man who takes money from a bank acts as if the bank were a commons. How do we prevent such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely by a verbal appeal to his sense of responsibility. Rather than rely on propaganda we follow Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements that will keep it from becoming a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be robbers we neither deny nor regret.

The morality of bank-robbing is particularly easy to understand because we accept complete prohibition of this activity. We are willing to say "Thou shalt not rob banks," without providing for exceptions. But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion.

Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now, but it need not forever be so. As with the four-letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassment. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its meaning. The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.

To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.

An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance--that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust--but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.

It is one of the peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status quo that it is thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is proposed it is often defeated when its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed out (21), worshippers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection of proposed reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions: (i) that the status quo is perfect; or (ii) that the choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.

But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils. Once we are aware that the status quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages and disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experience. On the basis of such a comparison, we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable.

Recognition of Necessity

Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man's population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.

First we abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farm land and restricting pastures and hunting and fishing areas. These restrictions are still not complete throughout the world.

Somewhat later we saw that the commons as a place for waste disposal would also have to be abandoned. Restrictions on the disposal of domestic sewage are widely accepted in the Western world; we are still struggling to close the commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide sprayers, fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations.

In a still more embryonic state is our recognition of the evils of the commons in matters of pleasure. There is almost no restriction on the propagation of sound waves in the public medium. The shopping public is assaulted with mindless music, without its consent. Our government is paying out billions of dollars to create supersonic transport which will disturb 50,000 people for every one person who is whisked from coast to coast 3 hours faster. Advertisers muddy the airwaves of radio and television and pollute the view of travelers. We are a long way from outlawing the commons in matters of pleasure. Is this because our Puritan inheritance makes us view pleasure as something of a sin, and pain (that is, the pollution of advertising) as the sign of virtue?

Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody's personal liberty. Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a loss. It is the newly proposed infringements that we vigorously oppose; cries of "rights" and "freedom" fill the air. But what does "freedom" mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, "Freedom is the recognition of necessity."

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity"--and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

Vi siete chiusi in voi stessi ?

Avete preso una pillola, bevuto un Gin Fizz ?

Con chi ne avete parlato ?

""Why are some people natural leaders, while others fail time and time again? It is a timeless question without a simple answer. Based on interviews with more than 40 top leaders, the authors

- Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas- in Crucibles of Leadership

conclude that one of the most reliable indicators "is an individual's ability to find meaning in negative events and to learn from even the most trying circumstances."

The authors term these intense, often traumatic, always unplanned experiences that shape leaders as 'crucibles' ("intense, transformational experiences") "after thevessels medieval alchemists used in their attempts to turn base metals into gold."

These leadership crucibles can take

different shapes and forms.

One of the most common types of crucibles involves the experience of prejudice. And some of the harshest crucible experiences illuminate a hidden and suppressed area of the soul (for instance, episodes of illness or violence).

But, luckily, not all crucible experiences are traumatic. They can involve a positive, if deeply challenging, experience such as having a demanding boss or mentor. So, how do leaders cope and learn from these difficult situations? ..." (Gerard Kroese)

...vedi La Piccola Fiammiferaia, sotto...

Any leader–Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al–faces challenges. Eventually most face crisis and while the magnitude varies the result is the same: their crisis leadership skills are revealed. Regrettably some leaders don’t develop the necessary skills until they are in the crucible of the crisis and by then it can be too late.

It behooves any leader to study crisis management before he or she is put to the test. History is replete with examples of leaders who have faced crisis and how they ultimately prevailed or failed. Like buying a home security system after the break-in, however, many leaders learn “on the job” when they are thrust into a critical situation.

character

We want character but without unyielding conviction;

we want strong morality but without the burden of guilt or shame;

we want virtue but without the moral justifications that invariably offend;

we want good without having to name evil…

want moral community without any limitations

to personal freedom.

In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms we want it.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep… tired… or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The author of a new book on the subject tells us what inspired his involvement

in the Occupy movement and how a leaderless revolution could work

The Leaderless Revolution explains why our government institutions are inadequate to the task of solving major problems and offers a set of steps we can take to create lasting and workable solutions ourselves.

In taking these steps, we can not only reclaim the control we have lost, but also a sense of meaning and community so elusive in the current circumstance. In a day and age when things feel bleak and beyond our control, this powerful and personal book will revive one's sense of hope that a better, more just and equitable order lies within our reach-if only we are willing to grasp it.

There are few books that attempt to interpret the world and how it is run.

The Leaderless Revolution offers a refreshing and potent contrast to the Panglossian optimism of Tom Friedman's The World is Flat but, like that book, it offers a way of understanding the world of the 21st century that is both clear and easily comprehensible.

Carne Ross takes different angles on contemporary issues

- economics, politics, the state of democracy, the environment and terrorism -

wrapping them into a unified explanation of how money and power

function to control the lives of the earth's inhabitants, such that they feel powerless

to affect their collective future.

It seems that mankind has settled upon liberal democracy as the ideal form of government. Its triumph with the collapse of communism signalled the end of ideological struggle and thus of history. The Leaderless Revolution will show however that even in democracies, many if not most of the population feel that they are excluded from any agency over the issues that most trouble them, while governments appear less and less able to influence the global problems that threaten our peace and comforts. Mining the rich but little-examined histories of both cosmopolitanism and anarchism, The Leaderless Revolution shows how both ideas, in combination, are relevant and necessary for the problems of today.

Not only an antidote to our global crises; Carne Ross offers, moreover, a route to fulfillment and self-realisation.

Occupy Wall Street

and

a New Politics for a Disorderly World

Carne Ross | February 7, 2012

As Kuhn’s theory might suggest, the rank contradictions of the current political-economic paradigm—gross inequality and massive environmental destruction—are so great that a new paradigm should emerge: a system of thought and method of political action that can address these ills, and indeed offer a better method of organizing and understanding human society.

As a diplomat in the British foreign service, I served deep inside one bastion of conventional politics—the world of international diplomacy. I helped propagate “top-down,” government-dominated politics across the world, including in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. I resigned because my government ignored available alternatives to violence and dissembled before the Iraq invasion (I had been Britain’s Iraq expert at the UN Security Council). This breach triggered a deeper questioning of the way things are done. I concluded that top-down management was not working and that conventional political models, including representative democracy, were producing not stability but its opposite, an increasingly fractured society at home and around the globe and a perilously vulnerable environment.

In my former career, I saw how governments attempt to enforce order on a world that resists their methods. But complex systems, such as a world of billions of dynamic connections, cannot be frozen as if on a chessboard, intelligible and susceptible to step-by-step command and control. Indeed, governments by their own admission are less and less able to control the massive, heterogeneous forces now making our world: dramatic economic transformation, mass migration and climatic change.

Worse, and this helps explain the failure, these attempts exclude the people most affected—ordinary people. It has become clear that even in our supposedly iconic democracies, government decisions do not reflect the needs of everyone but rather those who enjoy privileged access: large corporations, the superwealthy, the elites—the 1 percent who benefit from this disorder, like the speculators who play volatile markets, companies that profit from the absence of price on environmental destruction and the cynical politicians who exploit the growing anxiety and disaffection with crude and atavistic certainties.

* * *

A new politics is needed, and in the early weeks of Occupy Wall Street, I saw signs of its emergence. Some would see the Occupy protests as yet more evidence of disorder, not its solution. But to my jaded eye, the beacons pointing to a better method were bright indeed. At the UN Security Council and other diplomatic forums, I had taken part in high-stakes negotiations on everything from Iraqi WMDs to Palestine to the future of the Balkans. But the experience of hundreds of people listening to the voice of one—anyone!—through the “people’s mic” moved me more than any of those worldly negotiations. This was a politics of the many, included at last, at least in the small square of Zuccotti Park, if not in our distant capitals. Here I saw true respect, not the pretend respect of diplomacy. Here I saw involving and passionate debate, not the childish antagonism of Internet debate or the partisan rancor of Washington. The crowd was gripped by an unfamiliar emotion, a shared sentiment that others were listening and that their decisions truly mattered.

This is the start of a new politics, but obviously mere meetings and protest marches are not enough. There is nothing certain about the future, save that it is our actions that will create it and that others are already exploiting our inaction. It is no longer sufficient to appeal to government to put things right; a corrupted system will not reform itself. We must create new systems, new modes of decision-making and interaction, and new forms of economic behavior to replace the old.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrated some of the necessary elements of this new politics. Anyone who wished to participate could do so. All had a voice in decisions. These are the features of “participatory democracy,” which, when practiced more broadly, delivers outcomes unfamiliar from our own corrupted democracy: equality (because the interests of all are accounted for); transparency (and thus less corruption); and a civic culture of respect, not ugly partisanship.

This is a politics of the many for the many, rather than that of a small clique of elected representatives, co-opted by the powerful few. It requires patience and work, as the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park have learned. The consensus principle is vital, and prevents the “tyranny of the majority,” but it must (and can) be engineered to allow fast decisions and discussions of complex issues. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, mass participation in decision-making has succeeded in deliberating the affairs of a city, and the results clearly indicate more equal provision of services, better environmental protection and an improved political culture, one that is open, nonpartisan and uncorrupted.

Once decisions are made this way, they have immense force. Unlike with the distant machinations of government, all participants feel that they have been consulted. Everyone commits.

Participatory democracy should be promoted for every public setting, from our neighborhoods to our cities and counties. As turkeys will not vote for Thanksgiving, politicians are unlikely to institute such systems. Instead, we will have to set them up ourselves, starting local—our street, our building, our school—and in doing so establish legitimacy from the ground up, a legitimacy that today’s politicians evidently do not enjoy.

* * *

The second element is equally critical: this is the politics of the personal. Our political goals must be embodied in everything we do, for this is the most direct way to produce necessary and urgent change. Despite its perpetual encouragement by over-promising politicians, the habit of asking government to produce the ends we seek is out-of-date. Given the way that Washington (and indeed London or Paris) works, there is zero chance that any politician, even one with the best intentions, will deliver a just society, where the weakest are properly cared for and where the earth that sustains us is itself sustained.

Personal action is also the most effective means of influencing others. Forget Internet petitions, tweeting, writing to your Congressman or other formats of usually fruitless complaint—what you do will have the most persuasive force in encouraging others to do the same. Think of “the wave” in a sports stadium. This is the way to change a complex, highly interconnected system, not top-down management, as network theory and social research are demonstrating. And throughout, an older maxim carries an eternal message: the means are the ends, as Gandhi taught. If you use violence, you are likely to get violence. Like his famous Salt March (or Salt Satyagraha), the ideal political protest is the one that embodies the change you wish to see. Do it yourself, and nonviolently.

Self-organized, nonviolent action by the many, consulting all those affected: some would call these methods anarchism, but if so it is a very gentle kind. In fact, these techniques amount to a politics of modernity, of complexity, a politics most appropriate to our current state. These methods also inhere in a new economics, for Marx was in this sense correct: the economics makes the politics. You cannot have a fair, cohesive or happy society when a tiny few hold the vast bulk of the wealth and where companies are legally bound to maximize profits over all else, ignoring any un-costed effects to the environment or society.

There are forms of business that in their very design make up a better politics. Cooperatives share ownership among their staff as well as agency—that sense of control and participation that contemporary society denies us. As Britain’s massive retail giant John Lewis has shown, cooperative companies can be just as successful, and can endure much longer, than the merely profit-driven. “Triple bottom line” companies give equal weight to their social and environmental impacts alongside the profit line.

Such companies can be founded. They can be competitive. And we can support them by choosing them over more negligent businesses. In the OWS Alternative Banking working group, for example, we are building the elements of a new Occupy Bank [see Carne Ross, “Revolution Through Banking?” TheNation.com, December 22], which would be democratic, transparent and egalitarian, and would offer better services than for-profit banks.

* * *

Finally, it’s not just a better political system or a better economy that the new paradigm promises; it is also a richer aesthetics, a better culture. The ghastly homogenization and banality of consumer culture undermine our experience of life (this is perhaps the reason for the weird idol worship of the aberrational design fetishist Steve Jobs). The rabbit-hutch geography of the office combines with the humiliations of corporate culture (for bosses as much as the bossed-about) to alienate and demoralize everyone concerned. How we crave escape—pharmacological, alcoholic or virtual.

The current malaise is thus existential as well as political and economic. Nonetheless, this collective crisis can be captured in one word: agency. Control. We have lost it. We need to take it back.

The methods proposed here flow from an appreciation of society and the human project that differs fundamentally from the assumptions that underpin conventional neoclassical economics and representative democracy. The premise is that people are not merely self-serving but value other qualities—compassion, meaning, community, beauty—at least as much. That they can be trusted to run their own affairs, a trust that is repeatedly undermined in today’s fear-based culture. Hobbes’s “state of nature,” of war of all against all, is a bogeyman belied by real-life experience, which suggests that after disaster strikes, people facing common hardship collaborate without need for overweening authority, as Rebecca Solnit has eloquently written. Human nature is more beautiful than we have been led to believe.

But perhaps because the human is a rather subtle and undefinable beast, these methods, and this new understanding, may never make up a complete new system or structure, in theory or in practice. Marxism and neoclassical economics sought comprehensive explanatory systems of society and indeed of human behavior. Both in their ways proposed complete accounts of the human project, with all loose ends neatly tied off.

But if 1989 marked the end of communism, the global financial crisis and the insistent drumbeat of environmental disaster should mark the end of the political and economic orthodoxy that brought these perils about. The presumption of completeness inherent in both these thought-systems was their downfall because, inevitably, they left out crucial factors.

Marx failed to foresee that totalitarianism was an intrinsic risk of a self-appointed vanguard movement. The rationalist models of neoclassical economics failed to take account of the influence of irrational human behavior, like that witnessed in the credit bubble’s credulity, as well as the revealingly named “externalities” like social and environmental costs. Unpredicted and unmanaged economic volatility, mounting social fragmentation and grave environmental damage are now overwhelming the appealing but simplistic “internal” logic of equilibrium-seeking markets and utility-maximizing consumers.

Indeed, the pathetic human need for a complete explanatory system needs to be resisted, for no theory can offer a full account of a world that is already massively, and yet also increasingly, complex, where any event, from the destruction of a job to war, is the subject of countless factors, all in constant, dynamic interaction. We hunger for a detailed map of the world, but the best we can hope for is a general understanding of a new dispensation: complexity. And complexity does not demand management by authorities; it is instead best influenced by individual agents, acting by themselves at first, then with others, carrying the potential to affect the whole system.

This, then, is the new politics for a disorderly world. The defenders of the status quo claim that only their methods can maintain order. They are, in fact, achieving the opposite. The politics proposed here, and already evident in Occupy and elsewhere, can foment a deeper order, where people are connected to one another, reweaving our tattered social fabric, where work is fulfilling and responsible, and where everyone in society is given their proper voice and their interests are accounted for. Our current political and economic forms have made avowal of these ideals seem archaic, almost absurd. How ridiculous to wish for such virtues! We cannot let such cynicism triumph. A new way is possible, but it has to be enacted, not asked for.

The global financial crisis has provoked a profound and necessary questioning of the prevailing political and economic orthodoxy. So pervasive is this disillusionment with the current order that it is hard to find anyone prepared to defend it. Disorder is the new order; disequilibrium rules, and old assumptions no longer hold.

Down With Leadership

Posted: 02/ 2/2012 2:42 pm

The Republican primaries grind on. Now that Newt Gingrich has declared his determination to fight it out until the convention in August, the year’s news “agenda” will be wholly dominated by the soap-opera arguments of the presidential contest. Though tediously drawn-out, the ritualized debates reveal little of how the successful candidate will really perform once in office. But one message comes through, unintentionally, loud and clear. Our political culture, and indeed society, is obsessed with the idea of “leadership.” This obsession is not only demeaning (both to the candidates, and to us); it is profoundly dangerous.

Our culture fetishizes leadership. A thousand books extol the “leadership lessons” of tycoons and sportsmen. The leaders are wise; the rest are rendered impotent sheep. As the deification of the leader and his superhuman qualities reaches its orgiastic climax in the presidential election, it seems almost blasphemous to point out an awkward new reality. The king is shedding his clothes. Leadership, at least of the traditional political kind, is not working.

The nature of the world today is dramatically altered from the circumstance of only a few years ago. Globalization is spawning an immense and growing complexity, requiring new forms of management. It is simply impossible for any single authority to understand or arbitrate this maelstrom. Yet this omniscience is what we demand of our leaders.

Any event, from recession or war to the creation of a single job, is now the function of countless myriad and ever-changing factors. This always was the case, but now it is more so. Nevertheless, like children looking up at teacher, our infantile political culture requires the would-be leader to claim that they alone can make wise decisions to govern this extraordinary complexity. The gameshow format of the campaign debates (which tells its own story) only highlights the absurdity: “In 30 seconds, please tell us how you would save the economy?”

The evidence of the disastrous ineffectiveness of top-down “leader-led” management of the world is all around, should we care to see it. In the environment, climate change accelerates. In the economy, volatility mounts untrammeled by the confused and belated efforts of governments, forever behind the curve. In society, inequality and social tension are in parallel ascent.

Traditionally, and with easy resentment, we blame politicians and political parties for these failures. But the uncomfortable truth is they are not the problem. The problem is in fact us, for in our pathetic obeisance to the leadership cult we have abdicated not only our own responsibility, but, worse, our much greater power to deal with today’s new world.

In a complex system, the most potent agent of change is not authority but the individual, and the group. The era of a world organized and dominated by states and their leaders is ending. No one will take their place in the director’s chair. No single agency or leader will determine any particular event, or necessarily understand it. An era of leaderless change is upon us, where history will be written by the many, not the few.

This shift is buttressed by recent research in network theory: Complex systems resist centralized command-and-control, but individuals can trigger change across the system. Other research highlights another under-rated vector of change — those with most influence upon the behavior of others are not government, not experts, but those right beside us: neighbors, family and peers.

Conventional assumptions about political power are thus overturned. It is action by individuals, and with others, which offers the most effect. As we realize the decline of the leader-based model, a new form of self-organized politics will emerge.

Rather than looking to distant authority for answers, individuals and groups will pursue change directly through their own behavior, for the means, as Gandhi taught, are the ends. To arbitrate our common business, people are starting to negotiate directly and horizontally. In cities around the world, participatory democracy, where all can take part in decision-making, is producing fairer, less corrupt and more sustainable outcomes. Decisions made through mass participation reflect the interests of everyone and not just those with privileged connection to the leadership.

Watching the trading of hollow slogans in the debates, we intuitively know that the leader-centric model is not working. Taking responsibility instead ourselves will demand more work. But action by us is not only more effective, it is also more fulfilling than the cynicism and frustration evoked by today’s leader-obsessed political culture.

Worshipping leaders is more than usually dangerous in today’s new complex circumstance, but this cult has long denied our own remarkable power.

A new paradigm of political change

:
The political methods of the 20th century are, it appears, less and less effective for the world of the 21st.

The nature of globalization is without precedent: accelerating interconnectedness, with billions of people interacting constantly in a massive, dynamic, and barely comprehensible process.

Yet the assumption persists that the political processes and institutions designed in the 20th century, or earlier, remain appropriate and effective in this profoundly different state of affairs. In fact it appears that the ability of national governments and international authorities to manage the severe problems arising from this new dispensation are declining, despite their claims to the contrary.

Take climate change. The annual climate summit has just ended in Durban, after dozens of “preparatory” meetings and thousands of diplomatic discussions. Its output was a decision to agree a treaty in 2015 to introduce emissions limits in 2020. Oddly, many governments (and commentators) are claiming this as some kind of victory.

It is traditional to blame individual states (the US, China) for the failure to agree to more robust measures, and these do bear some responsibility. It is however also apparent that the process itself is the problem, and has been since its inception. The negotiation echoes traditional models of state-based interaction. Governments treat it as a bargaining process, where commitments to curb emissions have to be matched by other countries. The net result is that nothing is done.

The correct measure of Durban is not the declarations of success by the participating governments, which are required to trumpet their own effectiveness and negotiating prowess. The only output that matters is the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. This has grown with unprecedented rapidity by more than 10% since the first such conference, the so-called “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Effects in the real world should be the test of such processes, and indeed of all political methods, including government’s. By this measure, efforts to curb financial volatility or terrorism have been similarly ineffective. Experts say that the internationally-agreed Basel III rules to reduce risky banking practice are insufficient, and they are already being watered down by banks’ lobbying. Ten years after 9/11, and despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, we find ourselves in a condition of never-ending threat, multiple conflicts and the seemingly permanent embrace of an intrusive and hugely expensive security state.

There is a more pernicious consequence of the repetitive but tenuous claims to effectiveness made by the practitioners of conventional politics and government: everyone else is dulled into stupefied inaction. If “the authorities” claim to be on top of these problems, what does it matter what we do? And here’s the rub. We have been pummeled into a kind of dazed apathy, endlessly badgered by politicians that they can fix it, when in fact we are the most potent agents of change.

At home, democracy has been subverted. Corporations donate copiously to both parties to insure their influence. Politicians initiate legislation in order to extract rents from big business. Private prison owners lobby for longer sentences. There are now lobbying organizations representing the interests of lobbyists.

This legal corruption is deeply entrenched in our supposedly democratic political system, resisting all attempts at reform. It is naïve to expect decisions from this system to reflect the interests of ordinary people. And this is what we see: tax regimes that tax incomes of the poor more than the accumulating wealth of the rich; healthcare legislation whose primary beneficiary is the healthcare industry; a comprehensive failure to regulate the banking industry to prevent further violent crises such as the ‘08 credit crunch.

Cynical despair would be a perfectly understandable response to this dismal picture. But this reaction entirely suits those who profit from the status quo. Instead, this analysis leads to one clear prerogative: there is no choice but to act ourselves. If we are not to stand by while the world’s problems deepen, there is only one alternative: action based upon on our convictions, uniting with others for greatest effect. And as we shall see in the next post, such action is in fact far more powerful than any other method of politics in effecting real and lasting change.

A former diplomat, Carne Ross is the author of The Leaderless Revolution: how ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century, published by Blue Rider Press (Penguin), ebook now available, hardcover to be published in January 2012. For further information and videos explaining the book, visit www.theleaderlessrevolution.com.

This is the first in a series of four posts.

Non-violent, non-sectarian, non-ideological,

leaderless revolution by ordinary people

“The American power structure has been set reeling by something that is simply outside the boundaries of their mental universe: a non-violent, non-sectarian, non-ideological, leaderless revolution by ordinary people.”

For a few days, the imperial gang thought they had turned the tide — and their stenographers in the mainstream media followed suit. The protests in Egypt were running out of gas, we were told; now the power players were coming to the fore, in Washington and Cairo, to take charge of the situation and move things along — slowly, moderately — down a path of gradual reform and stability.

Newspapers ran pictures of the “nearly empty” Tahrir Square, sometimes in tandem with pictures of last week’s massive crowds. We saw shots of Egyptians “getting back to normal life” — going to the bank, shopping for shoes, crossing the street in suit, tie and briefcase on the way to the office. Attention was turned to the “moderate” figure who had taken the reins in Cairo, the dictator-appointed security chief Omar Suleiman. He was strongly backed by the Obama Administration as just the kind of steady, moderate hand we needed to make judicious concessions to the opposition without allowing the country to slip beyond the control of Washington’s foreign policy agenda. The general line among the imperial courtiers and their media sycophants was that the uprising had reached its peak and was now receding.

It was all a lie, part of the remarkably witless self-delusion that has afflicted the Washington-Cairo power structure from the beginning of the uprising: the illusion that they are still in control of events, that they can tinker a bit here, recalibrate a bit there, and still end up with the same system of elite domination and corruption basically in place.

But what we did see on Tuesday? The false reality painted for us by our betters simply melted away, and Cairo saw perhaps the largest protest yet, as hundreds of thousands of people filled Tahrir Square — including multitudes who were joining the uprising for the first time. Thousands more were gathering in front of the Parliament building in what the Guardian rightly called “a second front” of the uprising. And the Cairo crowds were joined by thousands massing in Alexandria, Suez and other cities across the nation.

This was the answer of the Egyptian people to the limp package of worthless, stalling “concessions” cobbled together by the Nobel Peace Laureate in Washington and his proxy torturer in Egypt. The reply to the regime was simple, powerful, concise: “We want our freedom. You must go.”

And oh, how that stung Washington’s new lordling! Suleiman immediately resorted to the same bluster we have heard from America’s henchmen since time out of mind. He put it plainly: “There will be no ending of the regime.” He railed against the “presence of protestors in Tahrir Square and some satellite stations insulting Egypt and belittling it” — obviously a reference to al-Jazeera — and declared: “We can’t put up with this for a long time.” And he sounded the time-honored “more in sorrow than in anger” note of all two-bit tyrants, saying that he hoped the protests would end because “we don’t want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools.”

This is pretty rich coming from the man who has been directly in charge of doing just that to Egyptian society for many years. The only way the corrupt regime has kept itself in power is by “dealing with Egyptian society with police tools.”

These be your gods, O Progressives! This is the man your champion had championed to “manage” the “transition” in Egypt from the dead hand of a discredited dictator to a backroom string-puller lacquered with a new coat of PR. Of course, when word of Suleiman’s private temper tantrum leaked out, the Obama Administration began to backpedal on the firm support for Suleiman it had shown earlier in the day (which had come complete with a long phone call from Suleiman’s long-time friend, Joe Biden). Now, the White House was troubled by these “unhelpful” remarks. Unhelpful indeed — for they gave the game away too soon. Wrong-footed by this unforeseen outpouring of popular will, Washington has not been able to cobble together a proper storyline to justify a violent crackdown by the regime.

The American power structure has been set reeling by something that is simply outside the boundaries of their mental universe: a non-violent, non-sectarian, non-ideological, leaderless revolution by ordinary people. Our power structuralists know only one thing: violent domination. Since that is what they seek to impose, they believe that anyone who opposes them must seek the same. They cannot conceive of anything different. They don’t know how to react to such an incomprehensible event. There’s no one to demonize. There are no armed groups to flex their muscles against — or to make a cynical deal with, if necessary. (Violent dominationists of every stripe have much in common; they know each other’s minds, they can often come to terms, if only temporarily — like Hitler and Stalin, or Reagan and Saddam.) The poltroons on the Potomac are dumbstruck as they look at these crowds of people who have freed themselves, who just walked out into the streets and claimed their human freedom — on their own, individual by individual, with no “authority”, no leader, no armies to “grant” them what is already theirs by their birthright, our birthright, on this our common planet.

It is now past midnight as I write. This has been a great day in Egypt — a day when truth tore through the lies and made fools of the killers, thieves and torturers trying to impose their cankered will on free people. May we see more such great days ahead — in Egypt and around the world.

The Leaderless Revolution,

Part 2: The Action of One

2011 will be remembered perhaps above all for the extraordinary wave of revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East. They were triggered by the self-immolation a year ago this week of one man in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi. It was an appalling act, but one of such devastating conviction that it inspired millions.

Our own politics has been in recent weeks illustrated by the banal spectacle of the Republican presidential debates. It could not offer a more hollow and passionless contrast. Whether the resemblance to The X-Factor is deliberate or subconscious, the public admission of the utter artificiality and boredom of contemporary politics could not be more conspicuous. The contest is dull because we already know who has the real power behind the scenes, and it's not us.

Like the "color" revolutions that overthrew repressive regimes in Ukraine and Georgia, the Arab Spring revolts had one goal: the removal of the oppressor, replacing autocracy with democracy. The object of the revolution was singular.

Those seeking fundamental change in western democracies face a different and more confusing situation. The lines of good and evil are not so clearly drawn, although they undoubtedly exist. We enjoy pluralism, freedom of speech, and democracy, at least in name and form, if not actual effect. The problems of today cannot be singularized, as dictatorship can. Mounting inequality, climate change, and the ultimate emptiness of much of modern life may be pernicious and potentially devastating problems, but they are also complex and resistant to simple remedy.

The causes of these ills are multiple but closely connected. The reckless pursuit of profit above all else is sustained by political institutions, and electoral process, that have been more or less completely, if often covertly, subverted by money and corporate influence. Remarkably, everyone seems to know this. We pretend to believe that our democracy works, even when we know that it doesn't.

The enemy that must be conquered is not a dictator, both easily identified and caricatured. It is both less blatant and more sophisticated. It is not one, but many. This means that a revolution to change things fundamentally for the better will not look like the Arab Spring. Protest alone will not dislodge the deeply entrenched forces that maintain an iniquitous status quo.

Indeed, protest in some ways helps legitimize this subtly but deeply unjust system, for it reinforces the pretense that the system is responsive to popular discontent. The bankers of Wall Street may secretly welcome "Occupy Wall Street" because one of its cultural effects is to remind the broader public that, unlike Egypt, America is, at least ostensibly, a free and democratic country. The subterranean reality however is that it is neither of these things, as the plutocrats are well aware. Both wealth and legislation are controlled by a tiny minority, and for their benefit.

This is a complex beast to fight, and it must be fought on many fronts and in many ways. This battle will not be won by marches on Washington, but by myriad small but substantive changes wrought by individuals and groups acting upon, as well as declaring, their convictions (for not only systemic change is needed, but also cultural). This revolution does not need a manifesto, or leaders. It can be, and perhaps needs to be, a leaderless revolution: a million acts of change, driven by individual conviction.

These acts might be to set up or give preference to new forms of economic organization, like cooperative companies that, owned by their workers, give weight to other values, social and environmental, as much as profit, but without sacrificing competitiveness. In one Occupy Wall Street working group we are seeking to establish a bank that by its very nature -- transparent, accessible, democratic -- will inject these values into the nervous system of the economy, and thus society (and offer better services than the for-profit banks, to boot).

But these multiple acts of change must also inhabit the simple choices of the everyday: what we buy and where we bank, and how we treat others -- celebrating the compassionate, shaming the greedy. And though simple, the decision to enact our beliefs in every circumstance is profound and liberating, not least because this is harder than it sounds. Dull, it is not.

The many steps towards a just and sustainable economy, and a truly inclusive democracy will be taken not by those we vote for, or petition. They will not emerge from the inevitable dialectic of history either. These steps require action and choices by us, individually, and then together. And here is one similarity of this revolution to the Arab Spring. Like the act of Mohamed Bouazizi, it can only start with one person, and that is us.

A gorgeously written book, in parts staggeringly superficial, yet championing a truth that might transform the world.

In lazer sharp prose, Ross illuminates the importance and relevance to our current world of several ancient truths:

*Actions speak louder than worlds.
*The individual does have the power to effect meaningful change.
*Participatory democracy can be strangely beautiful to experience, and giving regular folk the agency to take political decisions can be a highly effective way to solve local problems.

Ross aruges that if we are to make the world a better place, we as individuals need to physically engage with problems, as opposed to merely supporting good causes by donations and signing e-petitions.

Despite the books stellar qualities, Im only awarding 4 stars, as I fear theres a chance the work will have a net negative effect. So obviously sincere, this book may bewitch good natured people into effectively joining with free marketeers in their battle to minimize the benevolent (and tax raising) power of the state.

Similar to Le Carre who also served as a diplomat, Ross openly admits he's still traumatized by the harmful actions he participated in and witnessed on behalf of the state.

There's two token sentences saying many of those in public service are good people, but over half the book is relating stories showing the corruption and impotence of politicians, civil servants, journalists, NGOs, multilaterals and most of all the state. Ross even goes as far as to invent a half baked theory suggesting that even with the best of intentions its often impossible for the state and the current system of internal diplomacy to produce good outcomes, due to various supposed inherent contradictions. My own experience is that the folk involved in public service are, on average, far more generous, honorable and honest than most in the private sector where Ive spent most of my career.

Ross's own NGO , Independent Diplomat, has a great track record and he obviously has outstanding operational skills. But when it comes to offering an overall explanation of how the world works, a graduate student with good instincts good do far better. A few examples of the authors specific mistakes.

Early on Ross suggests that free market dogma is beginning to be used to offer moral justification for the suffering of others. In fact its been like this right from the start. When Smith laid the ground work for our modern conception of capitalism, he was practicing moral science. All the decent morality was lost under the baleful influence of Ricardo and others as they refined Smiths theories in raw free market dogma. So much so that as early as the 1840s, the free market rag "the Economist" opposed intervening to help the millions starving to death in the Irish potato famine, on the moral grounds that we'd be "interfering with the laws of nature."

Later on in the book Ross unequivocally states that opening ones countries to the imports of another is a good thing. Im not sure displaced workers thrown onto the scrapheap would agree. To support his extraordinary claim he cites that contemptible mouthpiece of the superclass , "the Economist".

Overall Ross gives the impression that in the last few years its only in a handful of cases that authorities have undertook effective efforts against poverty and mass violence. In fact there have been thousands of such cases, often involving the state, NGOs, mulitarals and local communities working in partnership. The excellent, freely available "2011 World Development Report" is a good source to find out whats been going on.

A better solution to the worlds problems is not to weaken the state in favour of anarchism as Ross wants, but to do the opposite, while also ensuring individual agency is protected and encouraged. A far, far superior new book on this is "The Courageous State" by Richard Murphy. In the 1950s and 60s, States in the developed and much of the developing world were successful not only in paying back the massive war debts, but also in reducing inequality and keeping unemployment very low (nicely under 1 million in Britain). They were guided by the principles of Lord Keynes, a man who wanted an active state but also recognized the value of decentralization and engagement.

Having said all that, I still recommend this book; I've never read a stronger case for the importance of personal engagement and the value of agency for all.

cioè al dire no agli avvenimenti.

Il male è l'assenza, il rifiuto del pensiero.

Pensare è infatti dialogare con se stessi, cioè porsi di fronte

alla scelta fra il giusto e l'ingiusto, il bello e il brutto.

Chi pensa, si dissocia, si allontana: anche senza far nulla,

dissente e apre lo spazio al giudizio.

Il pensiero l'unico antidoto contro la massificazione

e il conformismo

che sono le forme moderne della barbarie”

When the devil came
He was not red
He was chrome, and he said
Come with me
You must go
So I went
Where everything was clean
So precise and towering
I was welcomed
With open arms
I received so much help in every way
I felt no fear
I felt no fear
The air was crisp
Like sunny late winter days
A springtime yawning high in the haze
And I felt like I belonged
Come with me
hell is crome

Thursday, 21 January 2016

But surprisingly little is known about its history, which over time has been shrouded in competitive secrecy.

HBS history professorGeoffrey Jones

offers one of the first authoritative accounts in

Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry.

The global beauty business permeates our lives, influencing how we perceive ourselves and what it is to be beautiful. The brands and firms which have shaped this industry, such as Avon,Coty, Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, and Shiseido, have imagined beauty for us.

This book provides the first authoritative history of the global beauty industry from its emergence in the nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how today's global giants grew. It shows how successive generations of entrepreneurs built brands which shaped perceptions of beauty, and the business organizations needed to market them. They democratized access to beauty products, once the privilege of elites, but they also defined the gender and ethnic borders of beauty, and its association with a handful of cities, notably Paris and later New York. The result was a homogenization of beauty ideals throughout the world.

Today globalization is changing the beauty industry again; its impact can be seen in a range of competing strategies. Global brands have swept into China, Russia, and India, but at the same time, these brands are having to respond to a far greater diversity of cultures and lifestyles as new markets are opened up worldwide.

What’s taken so long?

According to author Geoffrey Jones, the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at HBS, the fragmented, secretive, often family-owned businesses that have constituted the industry have been difficult for scholars to unlock. Couple this with the fact that most business historians are male, and you have a major industry that still has lots to reveal. We asked Jones to discuss his research and his new book.

Sean Silverthorne: What inspired your interest in the beauty business and its history?

Geoffrey Jones:My initial interest in the beauty industry was triggered by my earlier history of the consumer products giant Unilever, published some years ago. This company had a long-established business in soap and other toiletries, but spent decades after World War II striving without great success to expand its business into other categories of the beauty industry, such as skin care and perfume.

As I researched this story, I realized both the huge size and the importance of this industry—and the remarkable paucity of authoritative literature about it. Or more precisely, while there are numerous books on various aspects of the beauty industry, from glossy coffee-table publications on cherished brands of perfume to feminist denunciations of the industry as demeaning to women, there were few studies that treated beauty seriously, as a business. So I saw both a challenge and an opportunity to research the story of how this industry grew from modest origins, making products that were often deemed an affront to public morality, to the $330 billion global industry of today.

Q:Why has this industry been so neglected by business school faculty?

A:I think there are two reasons. First of all, this is a difficult industry to research. Historically, it has been quite fragmented, with many small and often family-owned firms whose stories are hard to reconstruct. The industry as a whole is well known to be secretive—after all, its foundations rest heavily on mystique.

And then there is the frequently observed gender bias in business school faculty. I suspect male faculty, who comprised the majority in most schools until quite recently, regarded this industry as a feminine domain and rather frivolous, and felt more comfortable writing about software or venture capital than lipstick and face powder. As female faculty built careers in business schools, they may also have been disinclined to conform to assumed gender stereotypes by working on beauty. The fashion industry, which is also huge, suffers from the same lack of attention from management researchers.

Q:You write, “Beauty emerges as an industry which was easy to enter, but hard to succeed at.” How so?

A:It does not take a great deal of capital nor technological expertise to launch an entrepreneurial venture in many beauty products—although for such a venture to have any hope of success, high levels of imagination and creativity have always been required. If you have a concept for a new brand, and the necessary finance, there are contract manufacturers and perfumers that will provide a product for you.

This is also an industry subject to sudden shifts in fashion and fads, which disrupt incumbent positions and provide opportunities for new entrants. Brand loyalties are often weak, especially for “fun” products like lip and eye cosmetics, although less so for foundation, because it is more expensive and needs to be a good match with skin tone.

Achieving sustainable success in the beauty industry is another matter. It is fiercely competitive, with thousands of product launches each year. Even the largest, most professionally managed global companies find it hard to predict the success of product launches, and can stumble badly. One estimate is that 90 percent of new fragrance launches fail. Getting the word out to consumers, and getting product through the distribution channels to consumers, provide further major challenges for new ventures. Creative talent, astute marketing skills, and the ability to understand and respond rapidly to consumer fashions and preferences are all needed to succeed. There are fortunes to be made by building a successful new brand, but it takes an enormous amount of work and good luck to succeed.

Q:You artfully portray a vivid, passionate cast of entrepreneurs. Which do you consider the most influential? Do you have favorites?

A:The book emphasizes the role of individual entrepreneurs in building this industry. They varied enormously in their backgrounds and characters, but most shared a passion for the beauty industry, combined with an ability to understand the societal values and artistic trends of their eras, and to translate them into brands.

François Coty stands out as a creative genius in the formative stages of the industry in the early 20th century. Born as Joseph Marie François Spoturno on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, which was also the birthplace of Napoleon, he was a complete outsider to the traditional Parisian perfume industry. He went on to transform it. Assuming an adapted version of his mother’s maiden name as he strove to create a brand that symbolized style and elegance, he got his first order by smashing a bottle of his perfume on the floor of a prominent Parisian department store, in a successful gambit to get customers to smell it. He created two entirely new classes of perfume, soft sweet floral and chypre, and was the first perfumer to sell his wares in elegantly designed glass bottles, rather than in the pharmaceutical bottles used previously. An ambitious believer in globalization, he even sent his energetic mother-in-law to open up the American market in 1905. The American business proved so successful that its U.S. sales reached the equivalent in today’s terms of half a billion dollars by the end of the 1920s, before the Great Depression eviscerated what had become the world’s biggest beauty company.

Coty was a larger than life character, but he was hardly alone in this industry in that respect. The cast of influential and colorful characters includes Madam C.J. Walker, the daughter of former slaves in Louisiana who developed a system for straightening African-American hair, which was so successful that she ranks as among the first American self-made female millionaires. And then there was the ever-feuding Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, who transformed beauty salons from places considered the moral equivalent of brothels to palaces of opulence and style. And in our own time, Luiz Seabra stands out as the founder of Brazil’s biggest beauty company, Natura, which is dedicated to environmental sustainability with a broad social vision.

Q:How much does the industry influence our notions of beauty, and how much do accepted or popular notions of beauty influence product development?

A:The human desire to attract reflects basic biological motivations. Every human society from at least the ancient Egyptians onwards has used beauty products and artifacts to enhance attractiveness. However, beauty ideals have always varied enormously over time and between societies.

The book shows that as the modern industry emerged in the 19th century, it facilitated a worldwide homogenization of beauty ideals. Beauty became associated with Western countries, and white people, and with women. These assumptions reflected wider societal trends. Western societies as a whole underwent growing gender differences in clothing and work. And this was the age of Western imperialism. The industry’s contribution was to turn these underlying trends into brands, create aspirations that drove their growing use, and then employ modern marketing methods to globalize them.

I see beauty companies as interpreters of prevailing assumptions and as reinforcers of them. The debate is how much autonomy beauty companies have to shape ideals. Unilever’s current Dove marketing campaign, which uses senior women as models to make the point that one can be beautiful beyond one’s 30s, shows that a large company has the power to challenge stereotypes should it wish to do so.

Q:What was the impact of television both in helping define beauty and in developing the industry?

A:During the late 1940s, television spread rapidly across the United States, and soon afterwards elsewhere. Television offered remarkable new opportunities to take brands into people’s living rooms, and it drove advertising budgets sharply upwards.

Charles Revson was a master of using the new medium to grow brands. Revlon’s fortunes were made through its sponsorship ofThe $64,000 Questiongame show that began broadcasting on CBS in 1955. Later it emerged that the show was rigged, a scandal that even led to congressional hearings, but this had no discernible impact on either Revson or his company.

Television also proved a medium that new entrants could use to challenge incumbents. During the late 1950s, Leonard Lavin used television advertising to grow the tiny Alberto-Culver hair care business into a significant national player.

More recently, home shopping channels such as HSN and QVC have become important places to launch new brands. However, the impact of television was not limited to marketing. Color television drove innovation in makeup, which was subsequently diffused from actors to the wider public. And as the United States became a major source of television programming worldwide, it proved a major force for diffusing American ideals of lifestyle, fashion, and beauty worldwide.

Q:What do you think were the most significant products that marked its evolution?

A:I would begin with soap. The technology to make soap was known for several thousand years, but the product was rarely used for personal washing, especially by Europeans who largely avoided washing with water after the Black Death in the Middle Ages, believing it to be dangerous. Then, as public health concerns rose during the 19th century and water began to be piped into people’s houses, a number of brilliant entrepreneurs built a demand for soap as a branded product by linking its use to godliness, securing celebrity endorsement, and later suggesting that the use of some brands would bring romantic success. Using soap for washing became associated with Western civilization, and even as an essential entry ticket for immigrants seeking to become true Americans.

The transformation of perfume also marks an important stage in the evolution of the modern beauty industry. In the early 19th century, perfume was made in small batches, rarely applied to the skin, and drunk for health reasons. There was a narrow range of available scents. A hundred years later, the application of new technologies to extract essences from flowers and plants, and to create synthetic fragrances, had transformed perfume. Historically, perfumes were reminiscent of one individual “note”—to employ the musical metaphor used in the industry—which tried to replicate nature. The new perfumes had a vastly increased range of scents; were far more abstract, with three notes; and offered scents not found in nature. Meanwhile, a marketing revolution had turned perfume into a branded product, sold at different price points in different distribution channels, and increasingly gendered. While historically men and women had used the same scents, they now began to like to smell differently, with scents now reminding genders of their roles in the world.

As for decorative cosmetics, the story of lipstick is really interesting. While the use of lipstick, like many cosmetics products, reaches back far into human history, in the early 20th century it was still a product associated with actresses and women of dubious morality. Thereafter the use and acceptability of lipstick expanded. There was technological innovation—the first metal lipstick container was invented in Connecticut in 1915, and the first screw-up lipstick appeared six years later. By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, the government declared the production of lipstick to be a wartime necessity, such was its impact on morale.

Q:What does this book tell us about the impact of globalization today and going forward?

A:As I have suggested, the emergence of the modern industry was associated with an unprecedented homogenization of beauty ideals throughout the world. During much of the 20th century, homogenization was further reinforced by the impact of Hollywood, the advent of international beauty pageants, and so on. Beauty was associated with Caucasian features, as interpreted by the twin capitals of beauty, Paris and New York. Although the momentum for homogenization was strong, it was striking that markets stayed differentiated by inherited cultural and social preferences.

And globalization today is working in a far more complex fashion. The geographical spread of megabrands and globalization of celebrity culture certainly suggests further homogenization. During the early 1980s, China’s consumption of beauty products was close to zero. It is now the world’s fourth-largest beauty market-and the top brands in cosmetics and skin care are the same as in the United States.

However, there was also a new sensitivity to difference and diversity, representing a new pride and interest in ethnic and local beauty ideals. The tremendous growth of skin lighteners in India and East Asia is one sign of this trend. While global companies are concerned that the core claims—and usually the core technologies of brands—have to be the same worldwide, there is now also a concern that the forms in which such claims were delivered, whether in jars or creams, should be relevant to local consumers in each market. Moreover, as global firms experiment with taking new beauty ideals around the world, they are becoming agents of diffusion for different beauty ideals. L’Oréal, for example, primarily sold French brands before the 1990s. During that decade it purchased American brands such as Maybelline, Redken, and Kiehl’s and globalized them. And over the last decade it has acquired Shu Uemura in Japan, Yue-Sai in China, and Britain’s Body Shop. Global firms are, in this sense, now orchestrating diversity, not homogeneity.

Q:Both men and women played huge entrepreneurial roles in the development of the industry. Was one gender better than the other, generally, in creating success?

A:It is tempting to speculate that since so many of the products in the industry have been and continue to be aimed at women, being a female entrepreneur would make one better at interpreting women’s desires than a male entrepreneur. The industry has indeed seen a veritable roll call of influential female entrepreneurs. Over the last five decades alone, one can think of Estée Lauder and Mary Kay in the United States; Simone Tata, who virtually founded the modern Indian beauty industry; and Britain’s AnitaRoddick, the founder of The Body Shop. Among influential female business leaders today are Avon’s Andrea Jung and LeslieBlodgett of Bare Escentuals.

Yet for every successful female business leader, one can find male equivalents, including the misogynist Charles Revson who built Revlon as an industry leader between the 1950s and 1970s; the British-born Lindsay Owen-Jones, who turned the French hair care company L’Oréal into today’s global beauty powerhouse over the last two decades; and Shu Uemura, the Japanese makeup artist who created an exquisite, and now global, brand.

A further complication in reaching a definitive answer to whether there are gender advantages in this industry is that women are more likely to enter the beauty business than others, as the obstacles to entry for female entrepreneurs have been and continue to be higher for women than men in other industries, like construction, for example. So there is a lot of female entrepreneurial talent pooling up in beauty, while male entrepreneurial talent is spread more evenly across industries.

The book’s position on this question is that gender is not a main determinant of success in this industry, but that status as an “outsider” of some kind was important. This helps to explain why so many successful figures in the past were immigrants, or Jews, or—indeed—female.

Q:What are you working on now?

A:I am writing a book on the origins and growth of green entrepreneurship worldwide over the last six decades. This idea originated out of my research on the beauty industry, in which I explored the growth of interest in “natural” products. This is now one of the hottest segments of the global industry, with estimated sales of $7 billion.

In recent years, natural products companies like The Body Shop and Bare Escentuals, the San Francisco company that has built the minerals-based cosmetic market, have been snapped up by global players paying large premiums. However, what really interested me is the time it took to make this market take off. As early as the 1950s, entrepreneurs like Jacques Courtin-Clarins and YvesRocher began to experiment making cosmetics from plants rather than chemicals, decades ahead of perceived demand. They, and their counterparts in other industries such as food and cleaning materials who talked about the dangers of chemical ingredients and the need for environmental sustainability, were often dismissed as crazy, or at best irrelevant. Today, many of their ideas are mainstream.

This transition is the core of the book I am now researching. It will look at entrepreneurs and firms across a broad span of industries, and globally, that saw greenness as both a profitable and a socially necessary business opportunity, and that have led, rather than followed, regulators and public opinion in pursuit of their goals.